Still Life with Cabbage and Clogs

Still Life with Cabbage and Clogs, painted in 1881 and held at the Van Gogh Museum, is among the earliest works in his known catalogue and documents the very beginning of his serious painting practice during his time in Etten, where his parents were then living. He was twenty-eight, had failed at art dealing and evangelism, and was newly committed to painting as a vocation. The cabbage and wooden clogs were the most elementary possible still-life subjects — objects from the most humble stratum of daily life — and his choice of them was a deliberate artistic position: rejecting the conventional prettiness of flowers or the academic prestige of antique objects in favour of the coarse vegetable matter of peasant existence. The clogs specifically were a symbolic choice: wooden sabots were the footwear of the agricultural poor, and their inclusion in one of his earliest still lifes anticipates the extended meditation on shoes and boots that would recur throughout his career.

Executed in dense, dragged impasto with a restricted earth palette of ochres, umber, and grey-green. The paint is applied with evident pressure, the surface heavily built up. Little differentiation between background and objects keeps the composition austere and confrontational.