Bodegón con cinco botellas

This is Van Gogh four years before the sunflowers, when nobody would have guessed he was heading toward blazing colour. In 1884 he was living with his parents in the Dutch village of Nuenen and painting in the dark earth tones of the old Dutch masters he admired, browns and dull greens with almost no light in them. That autumn he took on a few amateur pupils from the nearby town of Eindhoven and set them to painting simple objects, and in his usual burst of enthusiasm he ran off a whole run of still lifes himself, bottles and pots and jugs on a table. Five bottles stand here in the gloom. Van Gogh had been painting seriously for only about four years.