Vase with Flowers

In the summer of 1886 Van Gogh had been in Paris only a few months, and he could not afford to pay models. That autumn he described what he did instead in a letter, written in English, to Horace Livens, a painter he had studied alongside at the academy in Antwerp. Lacking money for models, he wrote, he had made a series of colour studies of simply flowers. He listed red poppies, blue cornflowers, white and pink roses and yellow chrysanthemums, and said he was seeking oppositions, blue with orange, red with green, yellow with violet. This vase is one of those studies. In Dutch it is plainly Vaas met bloemen, while in German it goes by what it holds, asters and salvia among other flowers. It is one of dozens of bouquets he painted in Paris between that summer and the autumn, flowers being far cheaper to set up than a sitter.