Vase with Red Gladioli

Early in 1886 Van Gogh left Antwerp for Paris and moved in with his brother Theo, an art dealer. That summer he turned to flowers. A bouquet cost far less than a model, friends sent him flowers every week, and he bought cheap bunches himself. Over those months he painted more than 35 flower pieces. Writing that autumn to Horace Mann Livens, an English painter he had studied beside in Antwerp, he called them colour studies. He was after strong oppositions, red against green, blue against orange, yellow against violet, and intense colour in place of the grey tones of his Dutch pictures. This tall, narrow canvas belongs to that summer, a spray of red gladioli rising on long green stems out of a patterned vase. It has stayed in a private collection, listed as number 247 in the standard catalogue of his work.