Flowering Garden

Van Gogh's Flowering Garden, painted at Arles in 1888, belongs to his numerous garden subjects from that productive summer. The French garden — formal paths, beds of varied blooms, the interplay of cultivated and wild — provided him with material for pure color study as well as compositional exploration. Monet's garden at Giverny and the great Impressionist garden paintings of the 1870s provided a lineage into which Van Gogh inserted his own more intense, less atmospheric version. This work is currently in a private collection.

The flowering garden is rendered with Van Gogh's mature Arles technique — intense, varied color built from energetic brushwork. Different flower species are distinguished through varied stroke and color. The paths and borders provide compositional structure within the profusion of bloom. The palette is among his most chromatically rich.