Still Life with Bottle, Two Glasses, Cheese and Bread

Van Gogh arrived in Paris in the early spring of 1886, straight from the drawing classes of the Antwerp academy, with no income of his own and a palette still full of Dutch browns. A model had to be paid. A table did not, so through that first Paris year he worked his way through still lifes set up indoors, and this one shows what a cheap meal looked like at the time: a loaf, a wedge of cheese, a bottle and two glasses, with a knife left on the plate. The bright, high-keyed colour people associate with him is not here yet; that came over the following two years, once he was looking at Impressionist canvases every week. The painting never went on the market. It stayed in the family and passed with the rest of their collection to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation in 1962.