Flame Nettle in a Flowerpot

Flame Nettle in a Flowerpot (1886) at the Van Gogh Museum depicts a coleus plant — grown for its vivid, multicoloured foliage rather than its flowers — as a still-life subject that presented Van Gogh with an unusual colour challenge: intense pattern within a single leaf, not the colour contrast between flower and background but the simultaneous presence of multiple colours on the same surface. He was studying colour theory intensively during this Paris period, drawing on Delacroix's writings and his conversations with Signac about the optical behaviour of adjacent colour areas. The coleus's variegated leaves were a natural demonstration of the principles he was studying: red against green, yellow against purple, each combination creating a different visual intensity on the same small leaf surface. The potted plant as a subject was humble enough for his democratic sensibilities while chromatic enough for his current theoretical preoccupations.

The variegated foliage demands considerable chromatic precision, with adjacent zones of contrasting color on single leaves requiring careful calibration to read as belonging to the same plant. Van Gogh's strokes follow the leaf forms, their direction reinforcing the organic structure while the color juxtapositions demonstrate the vibrancy achievable through unmixed complementary placement.