Three Pairs of Shoes

Van Gogh's Three Pairs of Shoes from 1886, now at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, is one of the shoe still lifes that have attracted extraordinary critical attention, most famously from the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Three pairs of worn shoes — arranged on a surface, their deformations and marks of use fully visible — form a meditation on the human beings who wore them. At the Fogg Museum, one of Harvard's great art collections, this work is accessible to generations of students as one of the most philosophically suggestive of Van Gogh's still lifes.

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.