Vase with Red Gladioli

Van Gogh arrived in Paris unannounced at the end of February 1886 and sent his brother Theo a note asking him to come to the Louvre that morning. He moved in with Theo, and from June the two were living on Montmartre, among painters whose canvases were far brighter than anything he had made in the Dutch countryside. That summer he turned to flowers, more than 30 vases of them, partly in the hope that such pictures would sell.

In the autumn he told Horace Livens, an English painter he had known at the Antwerp academy, what he was really up to: making colour studies, red poppies, blue cornflowers, yellow chrysanthemums, looking for the opposition of red with green and blue with orange. Red gladioli standing against their green leaves in a patterned vase are that exercise.

The picture has stayed in private hands ever since, listed as F248 in the catalogue of his paintings.