Pink Roses

Among the flower paintings Van Gogh made in his final weeks at Auvers-sur-Oise in June 1890, this bouquet of pink roses belongs to a group of intense floral subjects that demonstrate his undiminished capacity for joyful colour even as his personal situation darkened. He was painting at the extraordinary rate of nearly a canvas per day, driven by an urgency that he acknowledged to Theo — 'I feel I cannot express myself more strongly than in canvases' — and flowers offered a subject that concentrated all his colour ambitions in a small, containable format. The pink roses' chromatic intensity against the cool blue-green background creates the complementary vibration he had been exploiting since his Paris study of colour theory, deployed here with the confidence of a painter at the height of his technical mastery. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen acquired this work as part of a broader Scandinavian enthusiasm for Van Gogh that made Danish and Norwegian collections disproportionately important repositories of his work.

Dense clusters of pink roses are painted with layered, petalled impasto strokes that create a sculptural, three-dimensional floral mass. The vivid pink of the blooms is heightened by the contrasting cool blue-green of the background. The composition is relatively close-up and intimate, the roses filling the canvas with a concentrated burst of organic form and colour.