Still Life with Vegetables and Fruit

In the autumn of 1884 Van Gogh acquired four pupils, all amateurs from nearby Eindhoven, among them a retired goldsmith and a tanner. They paid for their lessons in canvas and tubes of paint, and what he taught them was still life, objects set out on a table. The goldsmith, Antoon Hermans, kept a large collection of jars, pots, bowls and bottles that the group could arrange and paint. Teaching pushed Van Gogh back into the same exercise himself, and over that autumn and winter he made a whole run of them in his Nuenen studio. This is one, a cabbage with pears and root vegetables on a dark ground, in the brown and earth tones of his Brabant years.