Still Life with a Basket of Apples and Two Pumpkins

Van Gogh painted this in the autumn of 1885 in Nuenen, the Dutch village where his father was the pastor, in the same year he made The Potato Eaters. This is the Van Gogh from before Paris, working in heavy earth colours with barely a trace of the bright palette to come. He set himself a series of these autumn still lifes, baskets of apples and potatoes and gourds, mainly as exercises in modelling forms with different colours, and told his brother Theo he was enjoying them enormously. The pumpkins and the harvest fruit tied in with the peasant life he wanted to paint. Light falls across the ornamental gourds on the left and the cooking apples heaped in the basket, everything set against a plain dark ground.