붓꽃

Van Gogh painted these irises in May 1889, in the first week after he checked himself into the asylum at Saint-Remy in the south of France, following the breakdown in which he cut his own ear. He was allowed to paint in the walled garden, and he called work like this his lightning rod against a fresh collapse. There is no human figure, just a bed of irises seen close up, most of them a deep blue-violet with one lone white bloom off to the left, standing apart from the rest. He sent it to Paris, where his brother Theo entered it in a big exhibition that autumn. Van Gogh had a little over a year left to live when he cut these flowers into the canvas.