Garden with Butterflies

Garden with Butterflies of 1890, now in the Rijksmuseum, was painted at Auvers during the months when van Gogh produced dozens of canvases exploring the countryside around the small town north of Paris where he had come under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet. The butterflies in the title — white against the dense green and flowering garden — are rendered at a scale that makes them vivid without being decorative, as if observed rather than arranged. The Rijksmuseum holds this work as part of its collection of nineteenth-century Dutch and international art, where van Gogh occupies a position as the defining Dutch figure of the Post-Impressionist generation. Gardens at Auvers occupied van Gogh intensively during his final weeks, their order and abundance providing subjects that balanced his more turbulent field and sky paintings.

The garden is rendered in the dense varied greens and yellows that van Gogh developed for his Auvers vegetation subjects, with paint applied in short strokes of multiple directions that create a sense of growth and organic complexity. The white butterfly touches are painted over the existing green ground, their small scale requiring a steadiness of hand that the larger landscape strokes do not.