Roses
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · 1889
A rose bush fills the little canvas from edge to edge. There is no vase, no table, no sky, just a tangle of green leaves and stems with pale pink blossoms scattered through it like sparks. It is a small picture, barely bigger than a sheet of newspaper, but it has the density of a much larger one, and the closer you get the more it moves. Van Gogh painted it in the spring of 1889, in the walled garden of the asylum at Saint-Remy in Provence, where he had admitted himself after the crisis in Arles the previous winter.
Look at the brushwork. Every leaf is a separate stroke of thick paint, laid on in short curved dashes that follow the direction of growth, and the blossoms are built up in impasto so heavy it casts its own shadow. The green is not one green but a dozen, from yellow to nearly black, and the pink flowers have faded over time because the red pigment he used was unstable. When the picture was new the roses were a much stronger pink, and you can imagine the vibration between that colour and the green that surrounds it.
The garden at Saint-Remy was the only subject Van Gogh was allowed to paint in his first weeks there, and he made a series of close-up studies of its plants: irises, lilacs, ivy, and this rose bush. They are among his most tender works, painted by a man who had just lost everything and was trying to hold on to the world through looking. The canvas came to Japan with the Matsukata Collection, and it is the museum's only painting by Van Gogh.
Did You Know? Van Gogh painted the roses in the asylum garden the same month he painted the irises that now hang in the Getty Museum.
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