Grande pavone notturno

Van Gogh painted this in May 1889, in the first weeks after he admitted himself to the asylum at Saint-Remy in the south of France. He found the large moth in the garden there and wrote to his brother Theo about it, calling it a death's-head moth and regretting that to paint it properly he would have had to kill such a beautiful creature, so he worked from a drawing instead. He got the species wrong. It is a giant peacock moth, the largest in Europe, and it lacks the skull marking he imagined. He set it against the green of the asylum garden, one more thing to look at closely in a place he could not leave.