Flowering Garden

During the extraordinarily productive summer of 1888 at Arles, Van Gogh made numerous studies of the public gardens around the city, motivated partly by their immediate visual richness and partly by his decorative ambitions for the Yellow House he had just rented. He was planning to fill it with works that would create a total environment for the artists' colony he hoped to establish — what he called the Studio of the South. Garden subjects offered material for color study and for what he was developing as a distinctly southern palette: the vivid greens of Mediterranean foliage, the warm yellows and blues of the Provençal light. Monet's ambitious paintings of his own garden at Vétheuil in the 1880s, and the Impressionist garden tradition going back to Renoir's Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil (1873), provided a lineage of garden-as-studio. But where Monet was absorbing himself into the garden's reflective surfaces, Van Gogh was making gardens into color symphonies, heightening what he saw toward what he needed emotionally. The flowering garden's current private location, like many of his Arles subjects, reflects decades of dispersal through auction and private collection before the Van Gogh market achieved its current stratospheric status.

The flowering garden is rendered with Van Gogh's mature Arles technique — intense, varied color built from energetic brushwork. Different flower species are distinguished through varied stroke and color. The paths and borders provide compositional structure within the profusion of bloom. The palette is among his most chromatically rich.