Roses

In May 1889 Van Gogh checked himself into the asylum at Saint-Remy, in the south of France, worn down by the breakdowns of the previous winter. Within days of arriving he was painting the garden, and this small study of roses is one of the first things he made there. The undulating, aligned brushstrokes that mark his last and most intense period are already here in the petals and leaves. It is a modest picture, barely 33 centimetres high, of flowers seen in the grounds of a mental hospital by a patient who had asked to be admitted. Its later life was strange too. Bought for the Japanese collector Kojiro Matsukata, then seized by the French state during the Second World War, it only reached Tokyo in 1959.