The Flowering Orchard

Van Gogh had come south to Arles in February 1888 and arrived to snow on the ground. When the orchards broke into blossom in late March he went at them for a month and finished 14 canvases, telling his brother Theo he wanted to make a Provencal orchard of tremendous gaiety. The tall narrow format and the thin black branches cutting across it come out of the Japanese prints he had been collecting in Paris and pinning up on his walls. A scythe and a rake have been left in the grass here, the only sign that anybody works this ground. It is one of only two pictures in the whole orchard group with any human trace in it at all.