Wild Roses

On 8 May 1889 Van Gogh admitted himself to the clinic at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a former monastery just outside Saint-Rémy in Provence. For the first weeks he was not allowed beyond the walls, so the overgrown garden inside them supplied nearly everything he painted: pine trunks, ivy, long grass, and low down among it a rose bush like this one. The two halves of the picture are handled quite differently. The blossoms are done naturalistically, pale and thin. The leaves have become flat patches of colour, each one fenced in by a heavy blue outline, much the way the Japanese woodcuts he collected divide a plant into areas. That same enclosed garden gave him the irises he painted there in his first weeks.