Roses

By May 1890 Van Gogh had spent a year as a voluntary patient at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, in the south of France, and he had decided to leave. In his final days there he painted a short burst of large flower canvases, irises and roses, working fast and laying the paint on thick. This is one of them. What you see now is a bank of pale, almost white roses against a green-gold ground, and it did not begin that way. The pink he mixed for the petals came from a red that fades in daylight, and over the years it has drained out of the flowers, leaving them quietly bleached. The paint was so heavy that these canvases were still wet when he left on 16 May. He asked an attendant to dry them and send them after him, and they reached him at Auvers, north of Paris, that summer, only weeks before he died there in July.