Roses roses

Van Gogh painted these roses in June 1890, in Auvers-sur-Oise, in the last few weeks of his life. He had left the asylum at Saint-Rémy that spring and settled in the village north of Paris under the eye of a sympathetic doctor, and he worked at a furious pace, sometimes a canvas a day. Flowers gave him a subject he could set up indoors and study for their own sake, the way he had with the sunflowers. One thing worth knowing as you look: the reds Van Gogh mixed into these pinks have faded over more than a century, so the blooms read cooler and paler now than the day he laid the paint down. The picture went to Copenhagen, and it hangs in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, given to the museum in 1923.