Still Life with a Basket of Apples

Still Life with a Basket of Apples (1885) belongs to the series of autumn produce still lifes Van Gogh made at Nuenen as systematic tonal exercises and as acts of social solidarity with the agricultural communities whose produce he was depicting. The apple basket was a standard Dutch still-life subject that connected his work directly to the seventeenth-century tradition — the Dutch Golden Age had produced extraordinary apple and fruit studies — but Van Gogh approached it with his characteristic insistence on humble actuality rather than decorative abundance. His dark Dutch-period palette gives these apples the earthen weight he associated with actual agricultural produce rather than the chromatic brilliance he would bring to the same subject in Arles. Current location unknown.

The basket of apples is rendered with attention to the individual fruits' rounded forms and their arrangement within the container. Van Gogh's dark Dutch palette gives the composition its characteristic gravity, the apples' various reds and yellows modeled against the dark background. The basket's woven texture is observed with care.