A Pair of shoes

Van Gogh painted this in 1887, during his last stretch in Paris before he left for the south of France. He had picked up a pair of worn, second-hand shoes at a Paris flea market the year before, carried them back to the flat he shared with his brother Theo in Montmartre, and set them down as a subject on their own. The two Paris years had already changed his work. Under the influence of the Impressionists he met there, his colours lightened and his brushwork loosened from the dark Dutch pictures he had made before. He came back to these battered shoes more than once. Long after his death, writers from the philosopher Martin Heidegger onward would spend pages on what such a painting means.