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Van Gogh moved into the Yellow House in Arles in September 1888 and spent the autumn getting it ready for Gauguin, who came in late October: beds bought on credit, chairs, sunflower canvases for the guest room. The shoes in this still life stand on that house's red tile floor, which is how the picture can be placed. He had painted worn boots before, in Paris two years earlier, but those he set in dark corners against nothing in particular. The Met's catalogue passes on the suggestion that this pair belonged to Patience Escalier, an old Provencal labourer whom Van Gogh painted in the same weeks in a straw hat. Those same tiles turn up again in the picture of his bedroom, painted a few weeks after this one.