Geranium in a Flowerpot

In the summer of 1886 Van Gogh had been in Paris a few months, sharing his brother Theo's flat on the rue Lepic in Montmartre, and that autumn he set out the problem plainly in a letter to the English painter Horace Livens. He could not afford models. Flowers he could afford, and he worked through them in series, red poppies, blue cornflowers, white and pink roses, yellow chrysanthemums, using each one to test how colours behave next to each other. Blue against orange, red against green, yellow against violet. A potted geranium was cheap, it held still, and it handed him a hot red to set against green leaves. The picture has been in private hands for a long time and its present whereabouts are not on public record.