When the director of the Bremen Kunsthalle proposed that his museum buy van Gogh's Poppies in a Field at St-Remy in 1911, local artists rose up in fury. Why waste money on inferior French art when there was the echt German kind to be had right there? Standing in front of the picture, currently on loan to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, you suppress a little shudder. Three years after this outburst, German nationalism would take on an altogether bloodier tinge. So, too, would poppies in French fields.

The really odd thing about this story, though, is how untypical it was of Van Gogh's ...

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