Almond Blossom

Almond Blossom was painted by Vincent van Gogh in February 1890 at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, as a gift for his newborn nephew and namesake. The canvas, 73.3 by 92.4 centimeters, is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which grew out of the family's own collection.

What you are looking at

There is no tree, no ground and no horizon: only branches seen from below against a flat, luminous sky. The boughs enter from the lower left and spread across the whole canvas in a network of knotted, crooked limbs, outlined in dark blue and filled with green, ochre and brown. Along them open almond flowers, white with pink centers, some fully spread and others still in tight buds. A few petals are touched with red.

The sky is a single field of turquoise blue, painted in short, multidirectional strokes that keep it alive. The branches cut across it in sharp silhouettes and are cropped at every edge, as if the view continued well beyond the frame.

A Japanese-inspired composition

Van Gogh collected Japanese woodblock prints in Paris, and the close-up view of blossoming boughs against plain color, the bold outlines and the cropping all come from that source. He had painted flowering orchards at Arles in the spring of 1888, including a small branch of almond blossom in a glass, but here the motif becomes monumental, filling the canvas like a decorative screen.

A gift for a nephew

On 31 January 1890 Vincent's brother Theo and his wife Jo became parents of a son, whom they named Vincent Willem. Vincent wrote that he immediately began a painting for them to hang in their bedroom: big branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky. Almond trees flower early in Provence, in late winter, so the picture also reads as a sign of new life and hope. Shortly after he finished it, Vincent suffered a severe relapse of his illness. He died five months later, in July 1890.

The nephew grew up to found the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, and the painting passed with the family collection into the Van Gogh Museum, which opened in 1973.

Where to see it

The painting is on permanent display in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, near Sunflowers and the late landscapes. Compare its calm with the swirling sky of The Starry Night and the bright garden of Irises, both painted at the same asylum. More works appear in famous Van Gogh paintings and on the page for Vincent van Gogh.