Fliederbusch

In May 1889 Van Gogh checked himself into the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy, in Provence, after the breakdowns that had followed the ear injury. He was frightened of what was happening to him, but he asked for paints almost at once, and among the very first things he set up in front of were the irises and this lilac bush growing in the hospital garden. He wrote to his brother Theo about them within days of arriving. You can feel how much the work steadied him. The broken, separate strokes and the churning shapes come straight out of the Impressionist lessons he had absorbed in Paris, but the whole bush seems to twist and press forward in a way the Impressionists never went for. He would stay at Saint-Rémy for a year and paint the garden, the wheat fields, and the view through his barred window again and again. This early lilac now hangs in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.