Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass with a Book

Vincent van Gogh had stepped off the train at Arles in February 1888, hoping to find the bright, clear south he had pictured from the Japanese prints he collected back in Paris. What met him first was snow. Then, as the cold broke, the almond trees came into flower, the earliest of all the trees there to bloom. He cut a branch, stood it in a glass of water on his table beside a closed book, and painted this small still life, one of two he described in a letter as studies of an almond branch already in flower. The bare arrangement and clean line owe something to those prints he loved. It is barely the size of a sheet of writing paper, about 24 by 19 centimetres, and it stayed in private hands rather than in any museum.