Vase of Flowers and Cup

A blue vase of field flowers, a cup, a table, and nothing else. Bernard was 19 and working through a run of stripped-down still lifes he later called geometric syntheses, cutting objects back to plain shapes and unsaturated colour because he thought that came nearer to what they were than careful description did. Under the blue of the background you can see he changed his mind partway. A window was there first, and painting it out left the two objects alone on the table. The bouquet is a summer field bunch, and the same blue vase turns up in canvases he made at Saint-Briac on the Breton coast in 1887. In February 1888, a few weeks before he left Paris for Arles, Vincent van Gogh took this one from him in an exchange.