Almond Blossom
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · February 1890
Branches of an almond tree in full flower spread across a sky of clear turquoise. There is no ground, no horizon, no trunk, only the blossom seen from below as if you were lying in the grass beneath the tree. Vincent painted it at the asylum in Saint-Remy in February 1890, the moment he heard that Theo and his wife Jo had a son and had named him Vincent Willem after him. It was a gift for the baby, meant to hang above the bed, and it is the happiest picture he ever made.
The composition comes straight from the Japanese prints Vincent loved: a branch cut off by the edge of the frame, flat colour, strong outlines, no attempt at depth. But look at how carefully the blossom is painted. Each flower is built from separate strokes of white, pale pink and a touch of green, with small dark centres, and the branches are outlined in a grey blue that keeps them from dissolving into the sky. The sky itself is not one colour but a field of short strokes in several blues, which makes it seem to breathe. It is a slow, controlled painting made by a man who at that moment felt calm.
Almond trees flower first, before the leaves and before winter is really over, and Vincent chose them as a sign of new life. A few days after finishing it he suffered another breakdown, and he wrote that his work on the blossoming trees had been interrupted. The painting hung in the family home for decades, first above the baby's cot and then in the living rooms of the man he became, and Vincent Willem van Gogh kept it until it came to the museum with the rest of the collection. It is now the museum's most reproduced image and the one most likely to be on the bag you carry home.
Did You Know? The baby the picture was painted for, Vincent Willem van Gogh, lived until 1978 and was the engineer who founded this museum.
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