Piles of French Novels

In Paris in the autumn of 1887 a yellow paper cover meant one thing: a new French novel, cheap, and usually the modern kind that wrote about factory work, poverty and sex plainly enough to cause arguments. Van Gogh read them constantly and quoted them in his letters, Zola and the Goncourt brothers above all. So a visitor to his studio in 1887 needed no explanation for a table heaped with yellow paperbacks. It read as a declaration of what he thought painting should be about, which is why the picture is usually called an ode to contemporary literature. He gave the pile more room than most painters give a bowl of fruit, over 70 centimetres of canvas, and left one volume lying open at the front, turned towards whoever is standing there.