Three books

Three Books, painted in 1887 and now at the Van Gogh Museum, belongs to Van Gogh's Paris-period still lifes that document his passionate engagement with literature. Throughout his life Van Gogh was an avid reader — Dickens, Zola, Michelet, and the naturalist writers were particularly important to him — and books appear as significant still life subjects in several works from the Paris period. He associated modern literature with modern painting in a project of serious, unflinching engagement with contemporary life. This small panel painting of three books suggests this cultural investment through unpretentious directness: books as objects, treated with the same formal attention he gave to fruit and flowers.

The small panel format and intimate subject are handled with characteristic directness. Van Gogh renders the books as solid geometric objects — their spines, covers, and the ruffled edges of pages described through specific observational marks. His Paris palette gives the books vivid local colors rather than the dark tones of his earlier Dutch still lifes. The composition is simple and undemonstrative: three books, their relationship to each other establishing the pictorial geometry. The paint handling is confident and economical.