Unit 4, p. 40

In the 19th century, absinth was a popular drink with many, including artists like van Gogh. This still life shows a soltary glass of absinth on a café table and a bottle of water. Van Gogh combines this with a view through the window. The chosen vantage point makes it feel as though you are

yourself sitting at the cafe table where the painter sat.

After months of observing the local peasants' daily routines, van Gogh depicted a family gathered around the table for a modest dinner of the potatoes grown in their own garden. He chose his colors purposefully to connect his sitters with the earth that sustained them. The stark interior, their rough hands, and weather-beaten faces were the legacy of their life of labor. Neither sentimental nor romantic, The Potato Eaters expressed the compassionate sincerity of Vincent's

aims in art.

Van Gogh returned to his earlier panoramic approach to depict the first harvest of the year in The Harvest, which he painted in 1888. His deliberate approach to spatial organization -- the crops in the foreground, the fields above, and the mountains on the high horizon -- reveals his desire

to attain some epic grandeur.

Vincent van Gogh's Sprig of Flowering Almond Blossom in a Glass is an oil on canvas. He painted a sprig of an almond branch, which he forced into early flowering in a glass of water. The irre gular pattern of the little branch, covered with pale, translucent blooms, gave him a subject that recalled the depiction of flowers in Japanese prints. The simple division of the silvery, violet back ground with a

scarlet band pays tribute to the Japanese aesthetic.

Location in the artwork: Paris, France On his trips to the areas around Paris, van Gogh often painted outdoors. This view of the Seine river was also made outside. Quite untypically,

van Gogh did not complete this work.

When van Gogh arrived in Arles in the south of France from Paris, he was immediately inspired by the vast landscape. He painted this simple farmhouse in a cornfield there and then, partly in thick brushstrokes and partly using little stipples. Van Gogh made a sketch of this landscape in a

letter to his brother Theo.