Basket of Crocus Bulbs

January and February 1887, a Paris winter, and Van Gogh was working indoors. The previous summer had gone on teaching himself colour with flowers, and what sat in front of him now was a basket of crocus bulbs, dry and brown and weeks away from doing anything at all. He painted them close up regardless, in beiges and browns with a little green, filling the canvas the way a portrait painter fills one with a head. Bulbs were an ordinary household purchase for a Dutchman, bought in the cold months and pushed into pots or into soil to come up in spring. In the same weeks he made a second picture of the same idea, a basket of hyacinth bulbs, painted on a wooden panel and a little wider than this one.