Vase with Carnations

Van Gogh painted these carnations in 1886, the year he moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo and saw, for the first time, what the Impressionists were doing with colour. His Dutch work had been all browns and earth. Now he set himself a course of correction, and flowers were the cheapest way to run it. Between 1886 and 1888 he made more than 30 floral still lifes, calling them a series of colour studies, using each bunch to test brighter tones and a looser, more broken touch. This vase of carnations belongs to that stretch of experiment, the pinks and reds worked up against a plain ground. Within a couple of years the lessons learned on bouquets like this one would carry into his sunflowers.