Vaso con fiori rossi e bianchi

When Van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886 to live with his brother Theo, his painting still carried the brown gloom of his years in Holland. Paris pulled the daylight into it. He met Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat and other younger painters, and their brighter work rubbed off fast. Short of models and money, he bought cut flowers instead and painted bouquet after bouquet that year, using them mainly to practise colour, to see how a red could be made to sing against a white. This vase of red and white blooms is one of that run, made barely a year after the muddy browns of his Dutch peasant pictures like The Potato Eaters.