Van Gogh possessed an extraordinary ability to invest even the most humble motifs with great dignity. This talent is particularly apparent in the poignant painting of a beaten-up old pair of shoes.

Van Gogh painted these shoes in 1888, in the Provençal town of Arles, where he lived until a series of mental breakdowns forced him to enter a sanitarium in the nearby town of Saint-Remy. We don't know who actually owned the shoes in this painting. It’s possible that they belonged to a local peasant named Patience Escalier, who had posed for Van Gogh in the summer of ’88. Or the shoes might well be Van Gogh’s own; the tiled floor in the background is identical to that found in the famous Yellow House in which the artist lived. It doesn’t seem to matter whose shoes these were—but Van Gogh has infused them with such character that it's almost impossible not to see them as a pictorial stand-in for a portrait of their owner.