Still Life with Meat, Vegetables and Pottery

In the spring of 1886 Van Gogh turned up in Paris and moved in with his brother Theo, an art dealer in Montmartre. He had come straight from the Dutch countryside, where a year earlier he had painted The Potato Eaters, all browns and lamplight and heavy peasant faces. This small still life dates from that first Paris summer, and you can still feel the Netherlands in it: the dark ground, the earthy reds of the raw meat, the plain pottery. He was working through the genre the cheapest way he knew, arranging a little food on a table because it cost nothing and held still. Within a year the city would change everything, the bright colour of the Impressionists, Japanese prints, new painter friends, and his palette would open into the light we now think of as his. This canvas comes from just before that, when he still painted the way he had in the village of Nuenen.