Une paire de chaussures

Van Gogh painted this in Paris in 1886, the year he moved in with his brother Theo and started meeting the Impressionists. The story that has stuck to it comes from a fellow painter, François Gauzi, who said Van Gogh bought a battered pair of boots at a flea market, wore them out tramping through the mud on purpose, and only then set them up to paint. Whether or not that is exactly true, the shoes here are worn past comfort, the leather cracked and the laces loose, set against a plain reddish ground with nothing else to look at. He made several of these shoe still lifes in his Paris years. Decades later the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote a long, famous passage about one of them, imagining a peasant woman's whole hard life in the leather. The boots themselves say less and more than that. They are just the footwear of someone who walked a great deal, painted by a man who had recently done the same.