석고상, 장미와 두 권의 소설이 있는 정물

Van Gogh painted this in Paris in 1887, while he was living with his brother Theo and remaking himself as a painter. Two years earlier his colours had been the browns of Dutch peasant life. Here he sets a small plaster statuette against a background broken into loose strokes of green and pink, testing the brighter palette he was picking up from the Impressionists around him. The two books at the front are cheap yellow-covered French novels, the naturalist fiction of writers like Zola and the Goncourt brothers that he read constantly and thought told the truth about modern life. A single rose lies beside them, already shedding a petal. He treats the plaster figure as a warm living body against the cool ground.