Irises

The drawing is what makes it. Every leaf and petal is outlined in dark paint and filled with a few decisive strokes, a manner Van Gogh learned from Japanese woodblock prints, which he collected and copied. There is no sky and no horizon, so the flowers press right up to you, and the composition is cut off at the edges the way a print or a photograph would be. Look at how the blue of the irises has shifted; the artist used a red lake pigment that has faded, so the flowers were once more violet than they appear today. The single white iris was probably a deliberate note of contrast rather than an accident.

Van Gogh's brother Theo sent the painting to the Paris Salon des Indépendants that autumn, where a critic praised it, one of the few kind words the artist received in his lifetime. A century later, in nineteen eighty seven, Irises sold at auction for nearly fifty four million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a painting at the time, to an Australian businessman who could not in the end pay for it. The Getty bought it in nineteen ninety and it has been the museum's most visited picture ever since.

Did You Know? Van Gogh painted about one hundred and thirty pictures in the year he spent at Saint Rémy, the most productive period of his short life.