Still Life with a Basket of Apples

Van Gogh painted this basket of apples in the autumn of 1885, in the Dutch village of Nuenen, the same months as his dark peasant scenes. He was reading hard about colour at the time, especially how complementary tones set each other off, and he treated a plain heap of apples as an experiment, playing greens against reds and building the fruit up in thick, earthy paint. Within a few months he would leave for Antwerp and then Paris, where the bright canvases of the Impressionists pulled his palette wide open. Here he is still working in the low browns and ochres of the countryside where he grew up.