Still Life with Cabbage and Clogs

This is close to the beginning. In late 1881 Van Gogh, then 28 and only recently set on art, spent a few weeks in the studio of his cousin by marriage, the painter Anton Mauve, in The Hague. Mauve stood him in front of a still life of old clogs and a cabbage and let him work in oils straight away, which was unusual for a raw beginner. The picture is an exercise, a test of whether he could get the weight of a potato, the leather of a clog, the cloth on the table. There is none of the later Van Gogh in it yet, no burning color and no thick knotted paint. He kept almost nothing from these first months, and this one survived.