Vase avec œillets et autres fleurs

When Van Gogh painted this in 1886 he had just arrived in Paris to live with his brother Theo, trading the brown palette of his Dutch years for the brighter world of the Impressionists he was meeting in the cafes of Montmartre. That summer he set himself a practical exercise. Flowers were cheap, they held still, and a vase of them let him test one colour against another without paying a model. He worked through dozens of these bouquets in a few months, pushing reds against greens and whites to see what happened. The carnations here already carry more light than anything he had made in Holland, though he was still a year or two from the blaze of the south.