Peach Tree in Blossom

Peach Tree in Blossom, painted in spring 1888 shortly after Van Gogh's arrival in Arles, belongs to a series of orchard paintings he produced with nearly frantic energy that first Provençal spring. He wrote to Theo that the blossoming orchards were beautiful beyond anything he had seen, and he painted them in quick succession, sometimes finishing a canvas in a single day. The peach tree's brief flowering season imposed urgency; he worked as fast as the subject demanded. He dedicated several of these orchard paintings to his friend the recently deceased Anton Mauve, finding in the blossoming trees an emblem of both fleeting beauty and renewal. This version is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Oil on canvas with Van Gogh's rapid, confident brushwork from his most energized early Arles period. The peach blossom against blue spring sky required a delicate touch despite his high energy — small strokes of pink and white for the flowers, longer strokes for the trunk and branches, the whole composition aspiring to Japanese print-like freshness.