Could anyone give me any information on the painting “Three Pairs of Old Shoes” by Van Gogh?
This is not one of Van Gogh’s best known paintings; and there is no information on the web about them. But I have info. about another painting of shoes – one of the series he produced between 1887-88 (and the three pairs is part of it) described on page 70 of a book catalog of paintings exhibited in 1990 at the Rikjsmuseum, Amsterdam. As you probably know the three shoes painting dates from 1888, Oil on canvas, 49.0 x 72.0 cm. and is located in the Cambridge(Mass) Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Univ. The picture was painted in Paris where Van Gogh had arrived the previous year. It was in Paris that Van Gogh discovered color, but this painting in its dull coloration is more characterized of the dark , almost monochrome canvases he painted roundabout 1884 when living in the countryside at Nuenen. The text (referring to a painting from the shoe series) says that these were not his shoes, but ones he bought in the flea market and, if they even then looked too clean so he would “trudge about” for
