Fritillarie in un vaso di rame

Van Gogh painted these flowers in Paris in 1887, and the city had already changed his hand. He had arrived from the Netherlands a painter of dark peasant browns, and within a year, living with his brother Theo and meeting Signac and the younger Paris painters, his palette caught fire. The flower is the crown imperial, a tall orange-red bloom that opens in spring, set here in a plain copper pot. The background is stippled with small separate dabs in the manner the Neo-Impressionists were then working out, and the whole picture runs on the contrast of orange against blue. He kept this up only a short while before leaving for the brighter light of Arles in 1888.