Lilacs

Van Gogh painted this in Paris in the summer of 1887, his second year in the city. He spent it outdoors on the northwestern edge of town, walking out to Asnieres on the Seine with the young painter Emile Bernard and with Paul Signac, working on small canvases he could carry, riverside gardens, allotments and flowering shrubs. This one is roughly the size of a sheet of writing paper. That same year he was buying Japanese woodblock prints by the hundred from the dealer Siegfried Bing, and hung dozens of them on the walls of a cafe on the boulevard de Clichy hoping to sell a few. The painting ended up in Los Angeles with Armand Hammer, an American oil executive who spent his last decades collecting and who opened a museum for the pictures a few weeks before he died in 1990.