Fritillaires

Vincent van Gogh reached Paris at the beginning of March 1886 to live with his brother Theo, and within weeks he was painting flowers almost daily. He explained why that autumn in a letter to Horace Livens, an English painter he had known at the art academy in Antwerp. He could not afford models, so he had made a series of colour studies of flowers instead, hunting for oppositions of blue against orange, red against green, yellow against violet. These are fritillaries, the wild kind with chequered petals, rather than the tall orange crown imperials he painted the year after. The canvas measures 38 by 55 centimetres, it is catalogued as painted in Paris in the spring of 1886, and nobody currently knows where it is.