Pasture in Bloom

Two years earlier Van Gogh's world had been the brown lamplit rooms of Dutch peasants. This small meadow, barely a foot across, comes from the spring of 1887, when he was living in Paris and had spent a year among painters working in far brighter colour. You can see him testing the new Neo-Impressionist habit of laying down separate touches of unmixed paint, the greens and pinks and pale blues of a field in flower set beside one another rather than blended together. It is a modest, almost casual patch of grass, the kind of ordinary scrap of nature the younger painters in Paris had decided was worth close attention. The dark palette of his Dutch years has all but gone out of it.