Basket of Apples

By the autumn of 1885 Van Gogh had almost nobody left to paint. The parish priest in Nuenen, Andreas Pauwels, had been warning his parishioners away from the painter and his studio, and when a young woman who had often sat for him, Gordina de Groot, turned out to be pregnant, the village decided the child was his. It was not, and the models stopped coming anyway.

So he painted objects. Apples, potatoes, birds' nests, set out on a table in browns and greens, study after study through those weeks. This basket is one of them, a small canvas about 34 by 44 centimetres.

In the first days of October he took the train to Amsterdam with Anton Kerssemakers, a tanner from Eindhoven who painted as an amateur, and stood a long time in front of Rembrandt's Jewish Bride in the Rijksmuseum, which had opened only that summer.