Vaso con garofani

When Van Gogh painted these carnations in the summer of 1886, he had just moved to Paris to share his brother Theo's small apartment on the rue Lepic. He had arrived from the Netherlands still working in browns and earth tones, and the city changed his eye quickly. Theo admired Adolphe Monticelli, a Marseille painter who piled his flower pictures with thick, glowing paint, and Vincent studied him closely. A vase of carnations became a way to practise. He set the blooms against a dark ground and let colour carry the picture, pushing reds and pinks past the cautious harmonies favoured at the Paris Salon. The loose, rapid strokes in the petals show a painter teaching himself as he went. It is a small canvas, barely 40 centimetres tall, one of dozens of flower studies he made that single year.