The Flowering Orchard

The Flowering Orchard, painted in spring 1888 during Van Gogh's first Provençal spring and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, belongs to the series of blossoming orchard canvases he produced with urgent energy on arriving in Arles. He wrote to Theo that the flowering fruit trees were 'something fresh and joyful' unlike anything he had encountered in the north, and he painted them rapidly, sometimes multiple trees in a single day. The Met's version shows a single tree in bloom against an Arles landscape — the Japanese influence he sought in Provence visible in the clean outlines and flattened color planes. He dedicated several of these orchard paintings to his mentor Mauve, who had died that spring.

Oil on canvas with the light, rapid technique Van Gogh developed for his orchard series — clean, confident brushstrokes defining branches and blossoms against a pale sky, the influence of Japanese woodblock prints evident in the simplified silhouette and the emphasis on the decorative beauty of flowering branches.