Irises
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · May 1890
A great bunch of violet irises has been pushed into a plain vase and set against a wall of lemon yellow. Vincent painted it in May 1890 during his final weeks at the asylum in Saint-Remy, while he waited to be allowed to leave for Auvers. He had been working in his room on still lifes of flowers picked in the garden, and he described this one to Theo as a violet bouquet, from carmine to pure Prussian blue, standing out against a startling lemon background, an effect of very different complementaries that heighten each other by their opposition.
The flowers spill out in every direction, some stems standing straight, some breaking over the rim of the vase, and their long sword-shaped leaves cross behind them in a tangle. Vincent painted the petals with a loaded brush, laying violet, blue and touches of white on top of one another so that they look wet. The background and the tabletop, by contrast, are flat and thinly painted, which pushes the flowers forward. Look at the cast shadow of the vase, a strip of green blue on the yellow, and at the way the top of the bouquet almost touches the edge of the canvas.
Time has been unkind to this picture in one particular way. The violet of the irises was mixed with a red lake pigment that has faded, so the flowers were once far more purple and have drifted toward blue. The museum has studied the paint carefully and shown what the original colour would have looked like, and it is worth remembering when you see how strongly the blue now sits against the yellow. The canvas came to Amsterdam with the family collection and is one of two large flower pieces from those last weeks, the other being a vase of roses.
Did You Know? The irises were originally purple; the red pigment in the mixture has faded so much over the years that the flowers now look blue.
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