Flowerpot with Garlic Chives

This is a Paris winter picture, made in January or February 1887, when the weather kept Van Gogh indoors and a pot of garlic chives was the motif at hand. The canvas is about 32 centimetres tall, and he gave the plant the attention of a portrait, working out how a clump of green reads against a warm ground. What the pattern behind it belongs to has never been settled. It may be wallpaper from the apartment he shared with his brother on the rue Lepic in Montmartre, or a piece of an oriental carpet. Potted plants and cut flowers were his cheapest way of studying colour, and he had already worked through a long series of flower studies the summer before.