Apples

Apples (1887) at the Van Gogh Museum represents the simplest and most concentrated of Van Gogh's Paris still lifes — a study in the essential properties of a single common fruit reduced to its most basic elements of form, colour, and light. The apple had a long tradition in European still life painting that gave the subject a kind of art-historical depth without ostentation: from Dutch Golden Age fruit studies through Chardin's spare arrangements to the earliest Cézanne apples that Van Gogh was likely encountering through Theo's gallery activities. Cézanne's geometric approach to the apple — treating it as a sphere whose surface described a precise colour arc from lit to shadowed — was the most radical contemporary treatment of the subject, and Van Gogh's own close observation of how colour modelled the apple's rounded form engages the same fundamental problem from a more intuitive position. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Each apple is painted as a careful study in three-dimensional form modelled by light—strokes of varied colour following the fruit's spherical surface in a systematic manner that was becoming increasingly deliberate in his Paris period. The background is handled more loosely to push the fruit forward compositionally. The palette for apples—greens, reds, and the yellow-greens of illuminated areas—gave him an opportunity to explore the colour variations within a seemingly simple object.