Still Life with Two Jars and Two Pumpkins

By the autumn of 1885 Van Gogh had been two years in Nuenen, a village in the Dutch south, and his studio was filling up with the harvest, potatoes, apples, gourds, arranged on a table and painted in the browns and dull greens he then thought a serious picture required. This is one of the largest of that run, about 58 by 85 centimetres, two pumpkins and two rough jars spread across a canvas of the size he normally kept for figures. In early October he took the train to Amsterdam to see the Rijksmuseum, which had opened that July, and stood a long time in front of the Frans Hals paintings. He wrote to his brother Theo about how quickly they had been made, wet paint worked into wet paint, a whole head finished at one sitting.