Roses

Roses of 1890, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was painted at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1890 in the week before van Gogh left Provence for Auvers. The roses in the asylum garden had been blooming, and van Gogh made several canvases of them in rapid succession — pale pink roses against deep green leaves painted with the disciplined intensity of someone cataloguing what was beautiful and immediate. The Met acquired this work as part of its comprehensive representation of van Gogh's late output, where it sits alongside other floral subjects as evidence of the extraordinary pictorial energy of his final months. The painting was made without preliminary drawing, van Gogh working directly with the brush into a canvas primed with a pale warm ground.

The pale pink of the roses is achieved through careful mixing of white, rose, and warm grey tints, with individual petals defined by touches of deeper pink for the shadows and near-white for the highlights. The technique is notably controlled for van Gogh's late work, the composition built through careful adjacency of complementary tones rather than the urgency of his most agitated canvases.