Still Life with Basket of Apples

In the spring of 1887 Van Gogh and his brother Theo got to know Camille Pissarro, one of the older Impressionists, and his son Lucien, who was also a painter. The three of them talked about the new technique of painting in small separate dots of colour and about Japanese prints, and they became friends. That autumn Van Gogh painted this basket of apples and inscribed it to his friend Lucien, the only time in his Paris years that he dedicated a picture to a living fellow artist. You can see what those conversations had done to his hand. The apples are worked in short separate strokes of yellow, green and red, and the basket casts a pale blue shadow across what looks like a white cloth. It is a long way from the brown peasant studies he had been making in Holland only two years earlier.