Flame Nettle in a Flowerpot

A flame nettle is a houseplant, the sort that stood on windowsills all over Europe in the 1880s. Van Gogh had been in Paris only a few months when he painted this one, and he was using plants and cut flowers as colour exercises, canvas after canvas through the summer of 1886. The thinking behind it came from Eugène Delacroix, the French painter he admired most, who held that certain pairs of colours, set side by side, make each other stronger. So the leaves here run rusty orange against a blue background, with small touches of red and green laid next to one another along the stem. The plant is the pretext. Somewhere between late June and the middle of July that year he left the canvas at his brother Theo's apartment in Paris, and that is where it stayed.