Garden with Hollyhocks

On the back of this panel Ernest Quost wrote a dedication in French: to Theo van Gogh, this painting that my friend Vincent loves so much, with warm regards. The tense is the interesting part. Quost wrote loves, in the present, so he seems to have meant the gift while Vincent was still alive, perhaps just after Vincent passed through Paris in early July 1890 and saw the picture. Vincent died at the end of that month, and Theo followed him in January 1891. Hollyhocks were Quost's own subject, and here they stand in a bank of pink and white against a blue summer sky and a white wall, with a woman in long skirts walking up the sandy path towards them and pumpkin plants spreading at the right. The panel surfaced again in 1996, when the Vincent van Gogh Foundation bought it from a private collection.