A Pair of Leather Clogs

In the autumn of 1889 Van Gogh was a patient at the clinic of Saint-Paul outside Saint-Rémy in Provence, and there were stretches when he would not go out of doors at all. He painted anyway, from whatever stood in his room. Peasant work and peasant belongings had held him since his years in Brabant, and in the rural south they came back into his still lifes. Clogs with wooden soles and leather uppers were working footwear, and worn shoes had been his subject once before, in Paris three years earlier. Here a single pair fills the front of a canvas barely 32 centimetres high, given the room a sitter would get. The surface under them tilts up towards the viewer more steeply than it really would, a habit of his with tabletops and chairs.