Still Life: Bottle, Lemons and Oranges

On 1 May 1888 Van Gogh signed the lease on four rooms at the Place Lamartine in Arles, the house he would later have painted yellow. This still life comes from that same month. He was chasing what he called a symphony in yellow, and the hard part was keeping yellow from swallowing yellow, so the fruit sits in a basket against a light green ground, a dark green bottle stands behind it, and the shadows are put in pale blue to hold the lemons clear of the background. Fruit from the market held still and cost almost nothing. In 1909 the canvas was bought by Helene Kröller-Müller, the Dutch collector whose paintings later became a museum of their own, and she wrote that to understand Van Gogh's lemons she only had to imagine a few ordinary lemons laid beside them, and then she felt the world of difference.