Vase with Musk-mallows

Van Gogh arrived in Paris in the spring of 1886 to live with his brother Theo, and the city changed his painting fast. He had come from the brown, earthy work of Holland, and suddenly he was among the Impressionists and their bright colour. That season he painted flower after flower, cheap models that let him practise pushing his palette. This tall spray, long called hollyhocks though the museum now reads it as musk-mallows, is one of them, the blooms crowding upward with an energy the tidy Dutch still lifes never had. Over that one summer and autumn he turned out dozens of these flower pieces, more than in any other stretch of his life.