Three Pairs of Shoes

Van Gogh's shoe still lifes, of which the Three Pairs of Shoes at the Fogg Museum is among the most significant, have attracted philosophical commentary disproportionate to their modest scale because of Martin Heidegger's famous 1935 essay in which he used Van Gogh's 'painting of peasant shoes' to illustrate his theory of the disclosure of equipment's being through aesthetic experience. Heidegger's essay — later contested by Meyer Schapiro, who argued the shoes were not peasant shoes but Van Gogh's own Parisian shoes — initiated a remarkable philosophical and art-historical debate about what paintings disclose and what we project into them. Van Gogh painted shoes repeatedly during his Paris period, seeing in worn footwear a documentation of human lives and labor even more direct than his peasant portrait studies. Three pairs together — their varied states of wear, their deformations, the marks of specific feet and specific walking — created a taxonomy of human physical existence that carried the ethical seriousness he brought to all his working-class subjects. The Fogg Museum at Harvard's acquisition preserves this for generations of students as a philosophically charged as well as artistically accomplished work.

The three pairs of shoes are arranged across the composition with careful attention to their varied orientations and the specific marks of wear on each pair. Van Gogh's dark Paris period palette renders the worn leather with close observation of its cracked, deformed surfaces. The paint is applied with physical directness appropriate to the mundane materiality of the subject.