File:Van Gogh - Skizzenblatt.jpeg

Catalogue raisonné:

• JH405: Jan Hulsker (1980), The Complete Van Gogh, Oxford: Phaidon, no.  405.
  
• The sketches were made on a canal-boat trip from Hoogeven to Nieuw-Amsterdam and enclosed in letter 392 3 October 1883 to his brother Theo.
• Letter 392 to Theo van Gogh. Nieuw-Amsterdam, on or about Wednesday, 3 October 1883. Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Van Gogh Museum. "This time I’m writing to you from the very back of beyond in Drenthe, where I arrived after an endless trip through the heath on the barge.
  I see no way of describing the countryside to you as it should be done, because words fail me. But imagine the banks of the canal as miles and miles of Michels or T. Rousseaus, say, Van Goyens or P. de Koninck.
  Flat planes or strips differing in colour, which grow narrower and narrower as they approach the horizon. Accentuated here and there by a sod hut or small farm or a few scrawny birches, poplars, oaks. Stacks of peat everywhere, and always barges sailing past with peat or bulrushes from the marshes. Here and there thin cows of a delicate colour, often sheep — pigs. The figures that now and then appear on the plain usually have great character, sometimes they’re really charming. I drew, among others, a woman in the barge with crepe around her cap brooches because she was in mourning, and later a mother with a small child — this one had a purple scarf around her head."