Vase with daisies and anemones

By the summer of 1887 Van Gogh had been in Paris for over a year, and he spent that season painting flowers, at least 30 bunches in a few months. Cut flowers were cheap, they held still, and they let him work on the thing he cared about most just then, which was colour. Here a pale blue vase holds a loose mix of white daisies, red anemones, yellow blooms and sprigs of lilac, set on a green tabletop laid down in bright, broken strokes. The interest is in how the colours strike against one another, warm reds beside cool blues. The dark browns of his Dutch peasant pictures are gone entirely, and the clear high colour he had picked up from the painters around him in the city has taken their place.