Still Life with Apple Basket, Meat and Bread Rolls

Van Gogh painted this in 1886, the year he moved to Paris to share a small flat with his brother Theo. Look at the colours and you would hardly guess where he was. The browns and dull greens, the plain fare of apples, a slab of meat and a couple of bread rolls, all belong to the sober Dutch manner he had brought from Nuenen, the village where he had painted weavers and peasants at their potatoes. Paris was about to change him. Within a year or two the Impressionists and the younger painters working in dots of pure colour would push his palette wide open. Here that has not happened yet: the paint is thick and earthy, the light low, the food the same humble stuff he had been setting out on Dutch tables.