Garden with Butterflies

A patch of ground in a garden, seen from a step away, with two white butterflies over the grass. Van Gogh painted it in 1890, in his last months as a patient at the clinic outside Saint-Rémy in Provence. The walled garden was the piece of nature he could reach on the days he stayed inside the grounds, and in 1889 and 1890 he made a small group of pictures out of it with no horizon in them at all: long grass, poppies, one large moth, and these butterflies. In each of them the view is cropped so close that plants fill the whole canvas. He left Saint-Rémy in May 1890 for the north of France, and this one was never sold; it stayed in the family collection that grew into the museum in Amsterdam.