Une paire de chaussures

By 1887 Van Gogh had been in Paris a year, sharing his brother Theo's flat in Montmartre and painting whatever was within reach of it. A friend from the studio of Fernand Cormon, where he had briefly trained, remembered him buying worn-out boots at a flea market and walking them through wet ground until they looked used enough to be worth painting. Several canvases of shoes came out of those months. In this one he set one boot upside down, which shows the sole and its nails as well as the uppers. He left for Arles in February 1888. The painting reached Baltimore with Claribel and Etta Cone, sisters who had been buying modern pictures in Paris since before the First World War, and whose collection went to the city's museum in 1949.