Vincent van Gogh en het Franse stilleven

From the museum website, 31 July 2008

Painting still lifes is the beginning of everything, Vincent van Gogh believed. Starting with his very first painting in 1881, he used still lifes to practice artistic skills, such as the use of colour and the handling of paint. In 1886, when he went to Paris, the centre of the art world, for further study and discovered the colourful works of his French contemporaries, he felt compelled to rethink his own old-fashioned style of painting and approach to colour.