Piles of French Novels

Piles of French Novels (1887), at the Van Gogh Museum, is one of the most intellectually revealing works of Van Gogh's Paris period. He stacked popular French novels—the romans naturalistes of Zola's school and related writers—into colourful pyramids and painted them as still-life subjects, celebrating a literary culture he was voraciously consuming. The naturalist novel with its depictions of working-class life resonated with his moral commitments, and painting stacks of books was a way of honouring literary culture while exercising chromatic experimentation—the spines' varied colours offering opportunities similar to his flower arrangements.

The stacked book spines present rows of relatively flat, rectangular colour areas that Van Gogh treats with decisive, bold strokes—one for each spine's dominant colour, with variation to suggest lettering or wear. The composition's geometric regularity is unusual for him, but he exploits it as a grid structure against which to deploy complementary colour contrasts. The result bridges still life and colour-chart in a characteristic fusion of practice and theory.