Vincent van Gogh | Irises

About Irises by Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh painted Irises in May 1889, during his first week at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He had admitted himself days earlier. Not yet allowed beyond the walls, he painted what was in the garden.

He called it a lightning conductor for his illness — work as a way of holding himself together. There is no sign of distress in the picture. The irises crowd the whole canvas, cropped at the edges so the bed seems to continue past the frame, their leaves twisting in long green strokes against red-brown earth and a bank of orange marigolds behind. Blue against orange, green against red: complementary pairs at full strength, the same logic he used everywhere in Arles.

One iris, at the left, is white. Every other bloom is violet-blue. Van Gogh placed it there deliberately, and once you have seen it you cannot look at the picture without your eye going to it first.

Own a hand-painted Irises

The blues in this painting are not one blue. Each bloom is built from separate strokes of ultramarine, violet, near-black and cold white, laid side by side rather than blended, so that the bed reads as a mass of individual living flowers rather than a field of colour. Reproduction averages those strokes together — at any normal viewing size the distinct marks merge into a single flat blue and the irises stop being separate plants. Painted by hand in oils, the strokes stay strokes, and the bed keeps moving.