Carafe and Dish with Citrus Fruit

By early 1887 Vincent van Gogh had spent about a year in Paris, sharing his brother Theo's apartment and slowly leaving behind the dark browns of his Dutch years. This small still life comes straight out of that shift. He set an ornate glass carafe beside a dish of lemons in front of patterned wallpaper, which forced him to work out how coloured light bounces around inside the glass. Look at the tabletop and you notice it tips upward toward you, as if the dish might slide off. That is not a slip. Van Gogh was borrowing a device from the Japanese woodblock prints he was collecting then, tilting the surface to flatten the space. He signed and dated this canvas too, something he did only when he felt a picture had really come off.