Irises by Vincent van Gogh

Irises by Vincent van Gogh

The asylum garden

Van Gogh painted Irises in May 1889, soon after he arrived at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had admitted himself after his breakdowns in Arles. The picture is all foreground: no sky and no horizon, only a crowd of blue flowers and the long blades of their leaves, twisting and overlapping above a strip of red-brown soil. One white iris stands apart at the left, and a bank of orange flowers fills the top corner. The strong contours, the cropping at the edges and the flat areas of colour come from the Japanese woodblock prints he collected.

Bluer than it was

His brother Theo showed the painting at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris that September. It has changed since. The irises were once more violet: Van Gogh mixed his blue with a red pigment that has faded over time, and some areas that now look brownish were a bright orange. In 1987 the painting sold at auction for $53.9 million, at the time a record for any work of art.

Where it hangs

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired the painting in 1990. It measures 74.3 by 94.3 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 9,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 60 inches on its longest side.

Sources: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles · Wikidata Q2282256 · Wikimedia Commons