Bodegón con sombrero de paja

This is Van Gogh long before the colour arrived. He painted it in 1885 in Nuenen, the Dutch village where his father was the pastor, and at this stage his whole palette was browns and earth tones, the paint laid on thin over a rough paper ground. He was still teaching himself the basics, and a few years earlier his cousin by marriage, the painter Anton Mauve, had set him exercises exactly like this to practise colour and texture. So the picture is really a study of surfaces. The frayed straw of the hat, the shine of a glass bottle, a clay pipe, an earthenware pot with wicker handles, a white cloth. He drew the objects first in broad charcoal lines, then used almost no paint except in the highlights. Within two years he would leave for Paris, and everything about his colour would change.