Irises

Though not an exact copy, the present painting is indisputably ‘after’ the Irises painting by van Gogh now in the Getty Museum in Malibu. Contemporary records — mostly letters to his brother Theo — indicate that Irises was painted in the first month of van Gogh’s yearlong stay at the sanatorium in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889. Early in his stay van Gogh was confined to the hospital grounds, and his only access to nature was a small walled garden where irises grew in abundance. The cropped perspective of the painting has long been noted — with no horizon or broader perspective, the entire scene is occupied by a few square feet in which the irises rise dramatically and angularly from their stalks, with a small patch of red earth and yellow blossoms providing the sole foreground and background. Everything else is excluded from the painter’s mind and our line of sight — ‘eliminating all that’s made / to a green thought in a green shade’ as Andrew Marvell, another devotee of walled gardens, once said. The angular perspective in turn is likely due to the conventions of Ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock prints (of which van Gogh was an admirer and collector — particularly those of Hiroshige), wherein foregrounded details, from flora to rain, often cut across the image at a diagonal.

The present painting is expertly done — the rich colour palette of the original, combining geranium lake red, geranium lake blue, and ultramarine, is deftly echoed, while the rich and skilful impasto creates a texture and three-dimensionality that is deeply evocative of van Gogh.

A unique and particularly fine homage to one of the world’s most popular artists.