A Pair of Leather Clogs

In Paris, Van Gogh had painted several pictures of workman's boots. In Saint-Rémy he painted this pair of leather clogs, the attributes of the peasant life with which he had once more begun to concern himself in these rural southern areas. The artist also knew still life's featuring clogs from work by the peasant painter Millet, for whom he had great admiration. To Millet, clogs symbolized the poetry of peasant life.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks but received little recognition during his lifetime.

Van Gogh was unsuccessful during his lifetime and was considered a madman and a failure. He became famous after his suicide, and exists in the public imagination as the quintessential misunderstood genius, the artist "where discourses on madness and creativity converge". His reputation began to grow in the early 20th century as elements of his painting style came to be incorporated by the Fauves and German Expressionists.

Van gogh attained widespread critical, commercial and popular success over the ensuing decades, and is remembered as an important but tragic painter, whose troubled personality typifies the romantic ideal of the tortured artist.