Still Life with Copper Coffeepot and Two White Bowls

In April 1885, in the Brabant village of Nuenen, Van Gogh was working on The Potato Eaters, his large picture of a peasant family at supper under a hanging lamp. At that table one of the women pours coffee from a kettle. The catalogues of his work place this small still life in the same month: a copper coffeepot between two white bowls, on a canvas just 34 centimetres wide. He had begun painting pots, bottles and bowls the winter before, partly while teaching a few amateur painters from nearby Eindhoven, and he used them to study how light falls on objects and changes their colour. His brother Theo, who sold art in Paris, found these Nuenen pictures too dark. Vincent defended his dark colours by pointing to the old masters. The painting is now in a private collection.