Vase with Lilacs, Daisies and Anemones

During his two years in Paris (1886–88), Van Gogh used flower painting as a controlled laboratory for studying color relationships. He wrote to Theo that he was making flower still lifes specifically to practice the palette and technique he would need for his more ambitious figure and landscape work, treating the flower arrangement as a chromatic exercise rather than a sentimental subject. Lilacs, daisies, and anemones together offered a range of colors — the cool purple of lilac, the warm white and yellow of daisies, the varied reds and purples of anemones — that let him study how different colors behaved in proximity. The Museum of Art and History in Geneva holds this work, which entered the Swiss collections through the active early twentieth-century market. By 1887 Van Gogh had absorbed the lessons of Impressionist color from his encounters with Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir through Theo's gallery connections, and was beginning to push toward the more intense, more symbolically charged color system that would define his mature work. These flower paintings, modest in subject but technically ambitious in intent, chart the evolution from the dark Dutch palette to the incandescent southern work that followed his Paris years.

The flowers are arranged informally in a simple vase, their varied shapes and colors overlapping in a dense cluster. Van Gogh's brushwork differentiates each species — rounded strokes for daisies, looser passages for lilacs — while his palette experiments with cool purples and blues against warm whites and yellows.