Still Life with Paintbrushes in a Pot

Long before the sunflowers and the yellow house, Van Gogh spent a couple of dark years in Nuenen, a village in the Dutch south where his father was the Protestant pastor. In November 1884 he was teaching a few amateurs from nearby Eindhoven to paint, and he had them start where he thought any painter should, with still life. This is one of his own from that lesson, a flowerpot stuffed with his brushes among a few other pots and bottles. The palette is all browns and muddy greens, the paint laid on thick. It is an ordinary corner of a working studio, the tools of the trade set down and painted for their own sake. His great blaze of colour was still four years off in the south of France.