One of the most expensive paintings of the 1980s was a bunch of flowers. In 1987, a version of Van Gogh's Irises, painted in 1889, sold at Sotheby's in New York for 53.9 million dollars, a record for any painting at the time. The Metropolitan Museum's version is a close relative, painted in 1890, in the last weeks of his stay at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence before he left for Auvers-sur-Oise.
He painted the flowers from the garden at the asylum, where he was a patient, and the work was a kind of therapy. In a letter he said that painting kept him going. The garden gave him subjects when he could not go far, and he made dozens of canvases of flowers, trees and fields in that year.
You can see the debt to Japan. Like many painters of his generation, Van Gogh collected Japanese woodblock prints, and he admired their flat areas of color and bold outlines. Irises, a favorite flower of Japanese artists, are drawn here with dark blue contours, as if each leaf were cut in wood. He had even made a painted copy of a Hiroshige print in Paris.
The vase and table create a strangely cropped composition, with leaves running off the sides of the canvas as in a print. The blue of the petals plays against the green of the leaves and the soft, pale ground, a combination he described as a study of complementary colors.
He left Saint-Rémy in May 1890 and died in Auvers in July. Irises belongs to a small group of paintings that were made at the end of the asylum months, when his work was becoming freer and, many think, more confident.
Van Gogh's Irises appears on our: