Still Life: Majolica with Wildflowers

Van Gogh got off the train at Arles on 20 February 1888 and found the south under snow. By May the weather had turned, he had painted his way through the flowering orchards, and on the first of that month he signed the lease on a small yellow house on the place Lamartine. He did not actually move in for another four months and used it at first as a studio and a store. This still life is dated to that May. A glazed earthenware jug crammed with flowers from the fields around the town, painted in a rented room while the house he wanted stood empty. It is in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, where the pictures still hang in the arrangements Albert Barnes fixed himself.