White Vase with Roses and Other Flowers

Van Gogh came to Paris at the beginning of 1886 to live with his brother Theo, bringing a palette he had built in the Dutch countryside out of browns and earth greens. That summer he set himself a course of exercises. Writing to Horace Livens, an English painter he had met at the academy in Antwerp, he described making a series of colour studies of flowers, red poppies, blue cornflowers, white and pink roses, yellow chrysanthemums, hunting for oppositions of blue with orange and red with green, and for the broken and neutral tones that could hold those extremes together. This is one of them, a small canvas about 37 centimetres tall. Flowers suited the plan in a practical way as well. They were cheap, they held still, and there was no model to pay.