Orchard with Peach Trees in Blossom

Van Gogh reached Arles in the south of France in February 1888, and within weeks the fruit trees around the town began to blossom. He threw himself at them. In about a month he painted some 14 orchards, working outdoors against the clock, because peach and apricot blossom lasts only days before the wind strips it away. This is one of those canvases, a peach orchard caught at full bloom under a bright southern sky. He had been studying Japanese prints in Paris, and you can feel it here in the flat, clean patches of colour and the bare branches drawn like strokes of ink. He wrote to his brother Theo that he wanted the freshness of spring itself, and painted these fast and thin, sometimes finishing one in a single day.