Still Life with French novels and glass with a rose

Among the most personally revealing of Van Gogh's Paris period still lifes, this 1887 arrangement pairs French novels with a single rose in a glass as a meditation on the two primary sustaining forces of his intellectual life: literature and nature. The novels are almost certainly from his preferred shelf of French naturalists — Zola, whose L'Assommoir and Germinal he had read obsessively, or de Maupassant, whose prose directness he admired — writers who, like him, insisted that the lives of the poor and working class deserved serious artistic attention. He made multiple book still lifes in Paris, culminating in the more famous Still Life with Bible of 1885, which placed Zola's La Joie de vivre against his recently deceased father's open Bible as a statement about the conflict between faith and secular modernity. The rose adds a note of perishable beauty that Van Gogh associated with lyric poetry: nature's transience as counterpoint to the permanence of literature. The painting's current location is unknown, but it was photographed in the Van Gogh period and is well documented.

The composition is organised around the contrast between the warm yellow and orange of the book covers and the cool grey-white of the surrounding surface. Brushwork is confident and varied: thick impasto in the books, finer strokes defining the glass and rose. The influence of Dutch still-life tradition is visible in the deliberate arrangement and close observation.