Shoes

In autumn and winter Van Gogh could not get hold of fresh flowers to paint, and during his Paris months he went looking for other things to set on a table. Worn-out shoes were one of them. François Gauzi, a young painter who drew beside him in a Paris studio, remembered that Vincent bought old work shoes at a flea market, judged them far too clean for his purpose, and went walking through the mud in them until they looked properly used. He had been reading Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish writer who held that the mark of a real painter or poet is finding something worth looking at in the plainest everyday object. Between late 1886 and the first months of 1887 he painted battered shoes like these several times over.