Three Pairs of Shoes

Van Gogh came to Paris early in 1886, and that summer he painted flowers over and over, as he told a friend, simply as studies in colour. This canvas also began as a flower piece, a large bouquet in a vase. Around the turn of the year he covered it with six worn work shoes. Harvard's conservators had long known it was there, and new imaging during the museum's renovation, finished in 2014, showed the vase more clearly. Under the microscope, wherever the upper layer leaves a gap, tiny flecks of a quite different palette show through. On the surface, the shoe in the middle lies upside down with the nails of its sole exposed. Van Gogh scratched his first name into the paint twice, once near the bottom edge and once at the upper right.