Basket of pansies on a small table

The little table under this basket is shaped like a tambourine, which places the painting fairly precisely. Van Gogh made it in Paris in 1887, when he was often at the Café du Tambourin on the Boulevard de Clichy, a place fitted out with tambourine furniture and run by an Italian woman, Agostina Segatori, whom he painted sitting at one of those tables. In March that year he hung his own collection of Japanese prints on its walls, and in July a show of his work alongside three painter friends, Gauguin, Bernard and Anquetin. Flowers were practical work for him as well. Pots and bouquets were what painters hoped might actually sell, and a still life let him test colour indoors, here the yellow of the basket against the violet of the pansies. The canvas had a life before this one. He scraped an earlier painting off it and laid down black and white paint so he could use the support again.