Still Life with Clogs

In the late autumn of 1881 Van Gogh was barely a painter at all. He had only just decided this was the work he would do, and he went to The Hague to get a few lessons from Anton Mauve, a cousin by marriage and an established artist. Mauve sat him down in front of a plain arrangement: a couple of worn clogs, an earthenware pot, a green bottle with a little liquid still in it. That is the whole of this picture. The clogs are half hidden behind the pot, the colours are muted and brown, and if you look along the tabletop you can see lines he scratched into the wet paint with the end of his brush to mark the planks. It is one of the first oil paintings he ever made, done at the moment he was still being shown how to hold the materials.