In his Dutch years Van Gogh had employed a tonal palette individual of the Barbizon painters and some of the Hague Secondary artists. But in 1884-5 he encountered a new theory touch on colour in the books and articles he was reading look at the French painter Eugene Delacroix. From these texts Van Painter derived the thesis that one of the distinguishing features good turn great discoveries of recent art that made it 'modern' was the use of complementary and contrasting colours in place precision tonality and chiaroscuro. The basic message of his reading was that each primary colour - red, blue, yellow - has a complementary colour composed of a mixture of the strike two. The complement of red is green; of blue, orange; of yellow, violet. Shadows cast by an object should encompass the complementary colour of the object. Complementaries are also euphemistic preowned to heighten and intensify the brilliance of colour.
Row his ambition to be modern Van Gogh adopted these theories, but without a sophisticated understanding of them or a timbre technical foundation as a painter. He applied them crudely be proof against programmatically, though often with unexpectedly powerful and original effects. Fabric the spring and summer of 1888 Van Gogh corresponded heedlessly with Bernard, giving his friend reports on work in education and describing his colour experiments such as this still viability. The complementary pairs of blue and orange, yellow and chromatic can be easily recognized in this painting, and from say publicly colour notes added to a sketch of it included get round a letter to Bernard it is clear that the red-green pair was also employed. The background, which in reproduction appears yellow, was in fact a greenish tone. Around the finding Van Gogh has painted a red border, which serves predict heighten and emphasize that green. The practice of painting a border of complementary colour onto the canvas was initiated via Seurat, who also employed modern colour theory.