Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. His oeuvre includes landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, most of which are characterised by bold colours and dramatic brushwork that contributed to the rise of expressionism in modern art. Van Gogh’s work was only beginning to gain critical attention before he died from a self-inflicted gunshot at age 37. During his lifetime, only one of Van Gogh’s paintings, The Red Vineyard, was sold.
On the eve of his departure from the asylum in Saint-Rémy in May 1890, Van Gogh painted an exceptional group of four still lifes, to which both The Met’s Roses and Irises (58.187) belong. These bouquets and their counterparts—an upright composition of irises (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) and a horizontal composition of roses (National Gallery of Art, Washington)—were conceived as a series or ensemble. Traces of pink along the tabletop and rose petals in the present painting, which have faded over time, offer a faint reminder of the formerly more vivid “canvas of pink roses against a yellow-green background in a green vase.”This painting was seized by the Nazis from Georg Simon Hirschland (1885–1942) in Essen in 1939, following Hirschland’s emigration to the United States in 1938. It was restituted to his heirs in New York in 1950.
On the eve of his departure from the asylum in Saint-Rémy in May 1890, Van Gogh painted an exceptional group of four still lifes, to which both The Met’s Roses and Irises (58.187) belong. These bouquets and their counterparts—an upright composition of irises (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) and a horizontal composition of roses (National Gallery of Art, Washington)—were conceived as a series or ensemble. Traces of pink along the tabletop and rose petals in the present painting, which have faded over time, offer a faint reminder of the formerly more vivid “canvas of pink roses against a yellow-green background in a green vase.”This painting was seized by the Nazis from Georg Simon Hirschland (1885–1942) in Essen in 1939, following Hirschland’s emigration to the United States in 1938. It was restituted to his heirs in New York in 1950.
Vincent van Gogh - Roses
