The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

by Vincent Van Gogh

  1 Professional jealousy.

  2 A novel by the de Goncourts.

  3 With greater reason.

  4 After all.

  5 To understand everything is to forgive everything.

  6 Vice and virtue are chemical products, like sugar and vitriol.

  1 Armand Guillaumin (1841–1927), early Impressionist, some of whose work the brothers Van Gogh had acquired.

  2 The drawing L’Eden Concert.

  3 Christian Vilhelm Mourier-Petersen.

  1 Louis Anquetin, Harvest, 1887.

  2 ‘How short, then, the hour/One spends in loving, /It is less than an instant, /Little more than a dream. /Time strips us of/Our enchantment’

  1 Brothel Scene.

  1 Oleander.

  2 Paul Gauguin.

  3 Nègresses.

  4 By the Shore, Martinique.

  1 Doorman.

  2 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Young Woman at a Table, ‘Poudre de Riz [Face powder]’.

  1 The avant-garde group of Brussels artists, also called Les XX or Les Vingt.

  2 A series of books by Alphonse Daudet.

  1 This letter was sent by Gauguin to £mile Schuffenecker on 8 October 1888 with the observation, ‘I am sending you this letter from Vincent to let you know how things stand between us and with all our present plans.’

  1 Theo had just sold Gauguin’s La Bretotmes for 5 00 francs.

  2 The paint merchants Tasset & L’H6te.

  3 émile Bernard, Breton Women and Children.

  4 The painter Meijer de Haan had moved into Theo’s apartment

  1 ‘Wherever I touched the earth, a poor wretch dressed in black came and sat down next to us and looked at us like a brother’(inaccurate and incomplete quotation from Alfred de Musset, ‘La nuit de Decembre’).

  1 Gauguin’s fencing equipment, left behind in Aries.

  2 Augustine Roulin, ‘La Berceuse [Woman Rocking a Cradle]’.

  1 Louis Rivet, Theo’s doctor in Paris.

  2 Philippe Ricord, French surgeon specializing in syphilis; Francois Raspail, French chemist and politician who asserted that disease is caused by parasites.

  1 Theo’s birthday.

  1 Dostoevsky.

  1 Pissarro’s mother had recently died, and he had also had an eye operation.

  1 Madeleine au Bois d’Amour.

  1 Glad at heart.

  2 Auguste M. Lauzet, lithographer who had reproduced work by Monticelli.

  3 Mme Ginoux.

  1 Adolphe Monticelli, Vase with Flowers.

  1 Inter Artes et Naturam.

  1 The Dutch sculptor Saar de Swart.