Stillleben mit Birnen in einer Schale

In the summer of 1885 the Catholic priest in Nuenen told his parishioners to stop sitting for Van Gogh. Van Gogh was the Protestant vicar's son, working from a studio rented beside the Catholic church, and the village had settled on him as the man to blame for the pregnancy of a peasant woman who had modelled for him. His supply of faces dried up almost overnight. What he painted that autumn was whatever could not walk away: potatoes in an earthen dish, apples, a stone bowl of pears. He also sent a local boy out to find abandoned birds' nests, six of them, and worked those up into five more canvases. In November he gave up on Nuenen altogether and went to Antwerp, where he enrolled at the academy and started drawing from plaster casts and live models again.