Natureza-morta (F.1972.44.P)

This is Vincent van Gogh five years before the sunflowers, painting in the dark browns of the old Dutch masters he admired. He made it in the autumn of 1884 in Nuenen, the Brabant village where his father was the Protestant minister and where Vincent had moved back in with his parents. That winter he taught a handful of amateur painters from nearby Eindhoven, and he set up still lifes of pots and bottles partly as exercises for them to copy. There is no bright colour yet, only earth tones and a low, even light falling on plain kitchen things. He would not leave for Paris, and for the palette everyone now knows him by, until 1886.