Small Bottle with Peonies and Blue Delphiniums

By the summer of 1886 Van Gogh had been in Paris a few months, and he was painting flowers almost every week. Theo explained the habit to their mother in a letter. Acquaintances kept giving his brother a bunch, and the aim was to get brighter colour into whatever he painted next. This was among the first of those bouquets. He worked on a piece of card rather than canvas, which was cheaper, and he worked fast. Red flowers against a dark green ground put one colour beside its opposite, which is what these studies were for. That autumn he described the whole run of them to Horace Livens, an English painter he had met at the Antwerp academy, as a search for oppositions of blue with orange, red with green, yellow with violet.