Flowers in a Blue Vase

In the summer of 1887 Van Gogh painted flowers over and over, more than 30 bunches in a few months. There was a plain reason behind it. Models in Paris cost money he did not have, and cut flowers cost almost nothing, so a vase of blooms became his way to drill himself in colour. He set complementary colours hard against each other to make both burn brighter, blue beside orange, red against green, yellow against violet. He wrote that he painted almost nothing but flowers that season to train his eye off grey and onto pink, bright green, light blue, violet, orange, strong red. Here a pale blue vase holds a loose mix of white daisies, small sunflowers and red anemones. The background is not flat. It is built from short separate dabs of blue shading into grey and violet near the table, a habit he picked up from the pointillist painters he had just met in the city.