Natura morta con mazzo di margherite

This dates from 1885, Van Gogh's last full year in the Netherlands, spent in the Brabant village of Nuenen where his father had been the Protestant minister. His father died that March. By the autumn the Catholic priest of the village had told his parishioners to stop sitting for the minister's son, after one of the young peasant women Van Gogh had been painting turned out to be pregnant, and the models who had filled his year stopped coming. The colours here are still the earth tones and dark grounds of those Brabant canvases. He left for Antwerp in November and was in Paris by the following spring, where in the summer of 1886 he began a long run of flower studies in the opposite key, hunting oppositions of blue against orange and red against green.