Still life with coffee pot, dishes and fruit

Van Gogh painted this over two rainy days in May 1888, when the weather in Arles kept him from going out to the fields. He had just moved into the Yellow House and was buying the first cheap crockery to furnish it, and he had owned the blue enamel coffee pot at the centre only a few days. He was setting the place up as a future studio for a whole colony of painters he hoped would join him in the south. So he arranged his new kitchen things on a blue cloth and turned an indoor chore into a study of contrasts: royal blue against yellow-green, the round lemons and oranges against the flat of the table. He wrote to his brother Theo that he was after colours that were strong and simple.