Vincent van Gogh | Almond Blossom

About Almond Blossom by Vincent van Gogh

In late January 1890 Van Gogh received a letter from his brother Theo announcing the birth of a son. They had named the boy Vincent Willem, after him. Van Gogh, still at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, wrote back immediately and began painting.

Almond trees flower before anything else in Provence, often while the weather is still cold — the first sign each year that winter is ending. He chose them deliberately, and he painted them from directly underneath, looking up into the branches against the sky. There is no horizon, no ground, no trunk. Just cut branches spreading across a flat field of turquoise, exactly the way the Japanese woodblock prints he collected handled a subject.

He sent it to Paris to hang above the baby's cot. It is the only painting Van Gogh made for a specific wall in a specific family home, and it is by some distance the most peaceful thing he ever produced. Weeks later he suffered one of his worst relapses. The nephew it was painted for grew up to found the museum in Amsterdam where it hangs today.

Own a hand-painted Almond Blossom

There is a reason this particular painting suits a home better than almost anything else Van Gogh made: it was made for one. Not for a dealer, not for an exhibition, not to prove a point about colour — for a wall above a cot, in his brother's flat, for a child who shared his name. It is the one time he painted something whose entire purpose was to be lived with. Reproduced by hand in oils rather than printed, it goes onto a wall as what it was meant to be from the start: a painted object in a family home, given for a birth. It is still the most given painting we sell.