Woman Sitting in the Grass

Spring 1887, Paris. Van Gogh was sharing his brother Theo's flat in Montmartre and had spent a year unlearning the dark browns he brought from Holland. This small study is that experiment still in progress, the grass built out of short separate strokes of green, yellow and blue, the method the younger French painters around him were arguing over that season.

Fourteen years later it hung in Paris as number 40 in the first proper Van Gogh retrospective, which opened at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery on 15 March 1901. The poet Julien Leclercq had borrowed 71 paintings for it from French collectors and dealers, and among the visitors was a young painter named Maurice de Vlaminck, who met Henri Matisse in those rooms.

The picture passed through the dealer Ambroise Vollard and an Amsterdam auction in 1926, and it is still privately owned.