Vase with Cornflowers and Poppies

Cornflowers and red poppies grow as weeds in grain fields, and in June or July of 1887, while he was still living in Paris, Van Gogh painted a wheat field full of them, seen from low down among the stalks, with a bird flying up out of the crop. That picture is now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This one comes from the same summer and brings the two flowers indoors, cut and crowded into a narrow pale vase, with white marguerites mixed in among them. Behind them the background is brushed loosely in several shades of blue, and the tabletop under the vase is only roughly suggested. The canvas measures 80 by 67 centimetres. In 2012 the Triton Foundation, a private collection in the Netherlands, lent it to the exhibition Van Gogh Up Close in Philadelphia and Ottawa.