Nature morte aux bouteilles et poteries

Over the winter of 1884 and into 1885, in the village of Nuenen, Van Gogh painted this arrangement of bottles and rough earthenware while teaching three amateur painters over in Eindhoven to do much the same. He believed still life was the right place to begin, the way he had begun himself a few years before, and he set his pupils to it alongside his own work. The objects are ordinary household stuff, and he held the palette to the browns, greys and dull greens he then thought serious painting demanded. He was living in his parents' vicarage, and that same spring he would finish the great dark canvas of these Nuenen years, The Potato Eaters.