Bowl with Zinnias and Other Flowers

Van Gogh had come to Paris in the spring of 1886 to live with his brother Theo, an art dealer, and he arrived still painting in the dark browns of his Dutch years. That summer he set himself a task, flowers by the bowlful. In July Theo wrote to their mother that Vincent was mainly painting flowers, to put livelier colour into his next pictures. This bowl of zinnias is one of those exercises. You can watch him testing brighter reds and greens and laying the paint on thick, feeling his way toward the colour he had just discovered in the Impressionists working around him. Within two years he would be in Arles painting sunflowers.