Shoes

Van Gogh painted several still lifes of shoes and boots during his time in Paris, but he rarely returned to the subject after leaving the city. This painting, made in Arles in 1888, is a notable exception. Here, however, the shoes are no longer isolated objects: Van Gogh placed them on the distinctive red-tiled floor of the Yellow House, giving the composition a recognizable setting.

Van Gogh had moved from Paris to Arles, in the south of France, in February 1888, hoping that the brilliant Provençal light and intense colors of the landscape would help him develop a new direction in his painting. The months that followed were among the most productive of his career. He painted orchards in blossom, wheat fields, cafés, portraits, and some of his best-known views of Arles, experimenting with increasingly vivid color and simplified, expressive forms.

In May, he rented part of a small building on Place Lamartine, which became known as the Yellow House because of its brightly painted exterior. Van Gogh wanted it to be more than simply his home and studio. He dreamed of creating a community of artists there—his so-called Studio of the South—where painters could live and work together. He decorated its rooms with his own paintings, including the famous Sunflowers, in anticipation of Paul Gauguin's arrival later that year. He wrote to his brother Theo: "Like everyone else, I have need of relationships of friendship or affection or trusting companionship... so that I can't do without them without perceiving an emptiness and feeling their lack…"

The shoes in this painting therefore belong to an important moment in Van Gogh's life, when the Yellow House represented his high hopes for artistic independence and collaboration. Their owner may also be significant. The worn footwear has been described as a “still life of old peasants’ shoes,” and it has been suggested that they belonged to Patience Escalier, an elderly Provençal farm worker whose portrait Van Gogh painted around the same time, in the late summer of 1888.

P.S. These two artists shared a friendship as colorful as their art. Read more about Van Gogh and Gauguin’s relationship and their time together in the Yellow House.