Still Life with Clogs and Pots

In November 1884 Van Gogh had a small unofficial teaching job. A few amateur painters from the nearby town of Eindhoven were paying to learn from him, and to give them something to copy he set up still lifes of the plainest possible things: bottles, bowls, earthen pots, and here a pair of worn wooden clogs. He painted them alongside his pupils. The clogs are the muddy footwear of the peasants he lived among in the village of Nuenen, half hidden behind a rough brown pot. It is all done in the earth tones of his Dutch years, before Paris and the south taught him colour. He was still learning himself, working out how a single light falls across dull surfaces and pulls a shape out of the shadow.