Still Life: Vase with Zinnias

In August 1888 Van Gogh was in Arles, in the south of France, renting the small Yellow House he hoped to turn into a shared home for painters. He was expecting Paul Gauguin to come and join him, and he threw himself into decorating the rooms, painting quickly in the late-summer heat. The sunflowers everyone knows came out of those same weeks, and so did quieter pictures like this one, a fistful of zinnias crowded into a plain vase. He built the flowers up in thick, loaded strokes and set the warm blooms against a cooler ground, the kind of colour pairing he was describing in letters to his brother Theo just then. The house never held together the way he wanted, yet for a few weeks that autumn it was full of canvases like this, drying against the walls.