Still Life: Vase with Oleanders

Van Gogh painted his oleanders in Arles in the south of France in August 1888, in the sunlit months before Gauguin came to share his yellow house. He had thrown himself into the local flowers, and oleanders in particular meant something to him. He wrote that they went on blooming, always throwing out fresh shoots, and he treated them almost as a token of the healing, life-giving power of nature. Here the pink blossoms crowd out of a plain earthenware jug that turns up in several of his Arles still lifes. He set the greens, the pinks and the pale yellows against one another to feel calm and full of life at once, the way he hoped the south itself would come to feel to him.