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This is Van Gogh years before the sunflowers and the blazing yellows. He painted it in November 1884 in Nuenen, the Brabant village where his father was the Protestant minister and where Vincent, in his early thirties, was living back at home and teaching himself to paint. The palette is all browns and dull greens, the earthy tones he thought a serious painter had to master first. It is one of about a dozen small still lifes he set up that autumn, arranging bottles, a stone jar and a single cowrie shell on a table. He left it behind with his mother when he moved on, and it stayed in private hands until a museum in his home region finally bought it.