Still Life with Irises

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Still Life with Irises: Vincent van Gogh

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Vincent van Gogh Oil Painting - Still Life with Irises

Keywords: Life, Irises

Work Overview: Still Life with Irises
Still Life: Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background
Vincent van Gogh
Date: 1890; Saint-rémy-de-provence, France *
Style: Post-Impressionism
Genre: flower painting
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 73.5 x 92 cm
Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

In his last weeks at Saint-Rémy before he moved north again, van Gogh painted a series of still-lifes. The size and scale of these recall the monumental paintings of sunflowers of the summer of 1888, but the disciplined use of complementary colours also establishes a link with the experiments in colour and in flower painting which absorbed him in his first year in Paris, 1886. In Saint-Rémy he painted pink roses against a green ground, and here, violet irises against a yellow field. The painting betrays a renewed liveliness and intensity of colour. Instead of toning down the contrasts in order to harmonize the different parts of the painting, as he sometimes did, van Gogh has tried here, as he had done in Paris, to sharpen and heighten them. Van Gogh has painted these flowers on what was his preferred size of canvas in late 1888-90. The regular use of the same size of canvas meant that if and when his paintings were exhibited they would work together as a series.

Still Life: Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background stands out as one of Vincent van Gogh's most well known floral still life paintings.
The work, along with its companion piece Still Life: Vase with Irises, is unusual in that it's one of the few still lifes painted by Van Gogh during his stay at the asylum in Saint-Rémy. Van Gogh painted still life works throughout his ten year career as an artist--from the earliest works in Etten, through to the final works he executed shortly before his death in 1890.

Interestingly, the one period in which Van Gogh produced very few still lifes was during his stay in Saint-Rémy. Perhaps this was because the surrounding landscape of Saint-Rémy was so inviting--the olive groves and soaring cypresses were far more interesting to Van Gogh who so loved to paint outdoors. Perhaps Vincent was anticipating his upcoming move from the asylum--his home for more than a year--to Auvers-sur-Oise in the north (where Van Gogh would rediscover his love of still life painting).

Van Gogh had not painted still life during his stay at Saint-Rémy until the very last month of his year-long stay when he painted four striking bouquets of irises and roses.[37] To his sister Wil he wrote, "The last days in Saint-Rémy I worked like a madman. Great bouquets of flowers, violet-colored irises, great bouquets of roses."[32] Van Gogh's mother owned both upright versions of the irises and roses paintings held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art until her death in 1907.

In one of the iris paintings he places the large bunch of violet irises against a harmonious pink background. Unfortunately, over time, the pink background has faded to almost white. In the other, he use a contrasting yellow background.

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