Castañas y peras

Van Gogh painted this in Paris in the autumn of 1886, not long after he had moved in with his brother Theo and begun teaching himself brighter colour through small still lifes of fruit and flowers. It is a modest thing, a few pears and an apple tucked among chestnuts, the sort of study he turned out by the dozen that year. For a long time nobody was sure it was really his. The San Francisco museum that owns it kept it in storage for years as a suspected fake, and only in 2019, after study of its technique and paper trail, did the Van Gogh Museum confirm it was genuine. It had been listed, it turned out, in an inventory of Theo's collection back in 1890.