Bodegón, cesta de manzanas

Van Gogh painted this during the two years he spent in Paris with his brother Theo, from 1886 to 1888, and those years changed his work completely. He had arrived painting dark Dutch peasant scenes and fell in with the Impressionists and the younger dot-painters around Seurat. A basket of apples became an excuse to test what he was learning, the fruit laid down in short strokes of red, green and yellow against a background flecked with the same colours, so the whole surface hums. He gave the picture away to Alexander Reid, a Scottish art dealer who for a time shared the brothers' apartment in Paris. Van Gogh made more than one basket of apples that year. Another, dabbed in the same restless touch, he inscribed to Lucien Pissarro, the only living painter he dedicated a work to in those Paris years.