Glass with Yellow Roses

By the summer of 1886 Van Gogh had been in Paris a few months and had nothing to spend on models. He wrote about it to Horace Livens, an English painter he had met at the academy in Antwerp: lacking money for models, he had made a series of colour studies of flowers instead, red poppies, cornflowers, white and pink roses, yellow chrysanthemums, hunting for oppositions of blue with orange and red with green. This glass of yellow roses belongs to that run of studies, and the flowers in it are already going over, a couple of the heads dropping. He painted it on a piece of cardboard rather than canvas, roughly 35 by 27 centimetres.