꽃 핀 복숭아나무

Van Gogh painted this orchard in the spring of 1889, in the flat farmland of the Crau just outside Arles, with the low Alpilles hills behind. The timing matters. Only a few months earlier he had cut off part of his own ear, and through that spring he was moving in and out of the hospital in Arles, unwell and frightened about his own mind. Out among the blossoming peach trees he wrote to his brother Theo about the work with real steadiness, and he built the picture from the bright, clean colour and open space he admired in the Japanese prints he collected. It went to the Belgian painter Anna Boch in 1891, one of the very few people to buy a Van Gogh in the years right around his death.