Roses

In the late spring of 1889 Van Gogh was living inside the asylum at Saint-Rémy in Provence, and for his first weeks there he stayed within its grounds. His subjects were whatever grew inside the walls. In May and June he was cutting flowers and painting them in the second room the asylum let him use as a studio, and this small canvas, about 33 centimetres tall, came out of those weeks. It went north to his brother Theo in Paris soon after. The roses look white today. Van Gogh painted them pink, and the red pigment he used has bleached over more than a century, so the colour has drained out of them on the canvas itself. Faint pink still shows here and there. At the bottom, on a leaf, sits a rose chafer, one of those metallic green beetles that feed on garden flowers. It is drawn far more exactly than the roses above it, down to the barbs on its legs, and Van Gogh appears to have traced it from a sketch he had made earlier.