Flowering plum tree, after Hiroshige

In Paris in 1887 Van Gogh and his brother Theo were buying up cheap Japanese woodblock prints by the hundred, and Vincent set about learning from them by hand. He took a print by Hiroshige of a famous old plum tree in a garden in Edo, the old name for Tokyo, and copied it in oil, keeping the odd, cropped composition with a dark trunk shoved right up against the viewer. But he pushed the colour far past the original, a hot red sky behind branches of pale blossom. Around the edges he painted two orange borders filled with Japanese characters copied from other prints. They spell nothing, and were only there to make the picture feel more like the East.