Natura morta con mele cotogne

In 1920 the Dresden picture gallery handed the Berlin dealer Karl Haberstock two pastel portraits by Rosalba Carriera, the Venetian who had been the fashionable portraitist of the courts of the 1720s, and took this small still life in exchange. Dresden held more than 100 of her pastels and could spare two. What it wanted was a Van Gogh, 30 years dead and by then costly. The picture comes from his Paris years, and the museum dates it 1887 or 1888, the stretch when he was working through complementary colour, setting yellows against blue-green and laying red strokes against turquoise. It hangs in the Albertinum as gallery number 2593.