Apples

Autumn 1887, and Van Gogh had been reading colour theory: Charles Blanc on Delacroix and the rule that red and green strengthen each other when they sit side by side. A plate of apples was a cheap way to test it. In the same weeks he was organising a show of his own work in a large plain restaurant on the avenue de Clichy, hanging his canvases next to Bernard, Anquetin and Toulouse-Lautrec. That is the company this still life comes out of. The real experiment sits behind the fruit. He built that background from nearly every blue and green on his palette, so it refuses to stay back and keeps competing with the apples in front.