Vase with Red and White Flowers

This 1886 Paris still life of red and white flowers at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen represents one of Van Gogh's earliest attempts to reconcile his Dutch-period dark tonalities with the lighter palette he was encountering through the Impressionists his brother Theo was representing. He had arrived in Paris in February 1886 from Antwerp, where he had briefly studied at the Academy and encountered Rubens — an experience that had already begun to lighten his palette. The flower subject allowed him to test the full range of the transition: the dark ground still present from his Dutch training, but the flowers themselves beginning to glow with a chromatic independence his Nuenen work had never achieved. Van Gogh was also actively studying the Japanese woodblock print collection he and Theo had assembled, and the Japanese approach to flowers — each bloom distinct, attentive, non-hierarchical — was informing his treatment.

The flowers are painted against a relatively dark ground — still showing traces of his Dutch palette — but the blooms themselves glow with saturated reds and whites. Brushwork is more fluid and varied than his Nuenen work, with strokes beginning to take on the directional expressiveness of his mature style.