Small pear tree in blossom

Van Gogh had arrived in Arles, in the south of France, in February 1888, straight into an unexpected snowstorm. Within a couple of weeks the weather turned and the orchards around the town broke into blossom, and he threw himself at them, painting around 14 flowering trees in a few excited weeks. This small pear tree is one of them. He sets the thin, gnarled trunk right in the foreground against a pale sky, seen high and close in the way he had learned from the Japanese prints he collected. He had come south partly to begin again, and blossoming trees, standing for renewal, were the subject he reached for first. He wrote to his brother Theo about this one that April, pleased with its upright shape between two wider canvases.