What Color Are Van Gogh's Irises?
In honor of spring, the Gazette turns to the subject of flowers in art. This week: Vincent van Gogh's iconic blooms.
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In 2024, the Getty Museum held a special exhibition, featuring one of the crown jewels of its vast collections. “Ultra-Violet: New Light on Van Gogh’s Irises” showcased the exciting research conducted by the Getty Conservation Institute on one of Vincent van Gogh’s beloved floral studies.
Irises was painted in 1889, during the artist’s stay at an asylum in Saint-Rémy, France. The doctor who ran the asylum, housed in the Monastery of Saint Paul de Mausole, ensured that Van Gogh had an additional room to use as a studio. Many of his most famous works were painted there in 1889, including The Starry Night and Cypruses.
The garden at the asylum also proved to be a fertile source of inspiration. When the artist’s younger brother, Theo van Gogh, saw Irises, he submitted it to the Salon de Indépendants in September 1889. (Theo was a notable art dealer in Paris; he was tightly-ensconced within the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist circles.) Theo wrote to Vincent that at the exhibition, Irises “strikes the eye from afar. It is a beautiful study full of air and life.”1
The painting remains one of Vincent van Gogh’s most celebrated works. But one detail, for many years, perplexed art historians: the color of the flowers’ petals.
We are very fortunate that after Van Gogh’s death, followed by his brother’s early passing due to complications from syphilis, Theo’s wife Johanna took up the mantle of promoting Vincent’s art. In 1915, she also published Vincent and Theo’s letters, which to this day provide key insight into the artist’s tumultuous life.
One letter, written by Vincent on May 9th, 1889, informs Theo of the conditions at the asylum:
I wanted to tell you that I think I’ve done well to come here, first, in seeing the reality of the life of the diverse mad or cracked people in this menagerie, I’m losing the vague dread, the fear of the thing. And little by little I can come to consider madness as being an illness like any other. Then the change of surroundings is doing me good, I imagine…
Have you by chance yet received the crate of paintings, I’m curious to know if they’ve suffered more, yes or no.
I have two others on the go — violet irises and a lilac bush. Two subjects taken from the garden.2
Violet irises. Not blue, violet.
Van Gogh was deeply fascinated by color theory, and his letters to his brother, especially those that list orders for specific pigments, demonstrate that he would never have mistaken the two shades. Did Van Gogh decide to paint from imagination, or had the color of the paint transformed over time?
Thanks to the research team at the Getty, we now know that the flowers were indeed violet.
Irises is part of the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, and it is always on view at one of its sites, the Getty Center in Los Angeles. (The Getty Villa in Malibu houses its antiquities collection.) However, closures during the COVID pandemic gave the Getty’s conservators the opportunity to conduct new research on the painting. This included examining the painting with a stereo microscope and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a non-invasive method of scanning the painting.3
With these tools, the team discovered that one of the pigments used to create the flowers was a red pigment called geranium lake—a popular choice for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, but one that is highly sensitive to light. Over the years, the pigment faded, which is why the flowers appear blue today. The study also determined that Van Gogh painted Irises en plein air: scans revealed that embedded in the paint was a small piece of pine pollen, likely derived from an umbrella pine in the asylum’s garden.4 Visitors can find irises blooming in the garden at Saint Paul de Mausole to this day.
Despite the fading of the violet irises, the complementary color scheme works either way: the once-purple petals against the flowers’ yellow stamens, now blue petals against the orange marigolds in the background. The green leaves against the reddish soil. Van Gogh’s studies of color theory aided him in capturing a scene that, in his brother’s words, “strikes the eye from afar.”
Van Gogh’s love of color truly blossomed in France. He moved to Paris in 1886 at Theo’s behest. Theo van Gogh wrote to him often of the Impressionists, who in the twelve years since their first exhibition had courted much controversy for their radical style. Vincent himself was perplexed by their vibrant use of color, made possible thanks to the new availability of synthetic pigments. His initial view of Impressionism was far more critical, likely a reflection of his academic training:
One has heard about the impressionists, one expects much and … when one sees them for the first time, one is very much disappointed and thinks they are ugly, sloppily and badly painted, badly drawn, of a poor color; everything that is miserable. That was my first impression also, when I came to Paris…5
But his views evolved, especially thanks to the influence of Camille Pissarro, who took Van Gogh under his wing. Like the Impressionists, Van Gogh was greatly inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints, many of which feature the bright florals that would eventually find their way into his art. Soon, Van Gogh’s paintings transformed from darker, naturalistic works to those we associate with the artist today: pieces full of expression and clever use of complementary hues.
What’s astounding is the speed of this evolution. After trying his hand at preaching, teaching, and art dealing, he only discovered his talent for painting a few years before moving to Paris at the age of thirty-three. Just two years later, shortly after relocating further south to Arles, he wrote of his desire to go beyond Impressionism:
What I learned in Paris is leaving me and I am returning to the ideas I had … before I knew the impressionists. And I should not be surprised if the impressionists soon find fault with my way of working, for it has been fertilized by the ideas of Delacroix rather than by theirs. Because, instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly.6
Irises succeeds in this endeavor because the visual contrast of the color scheme and the outlining of its forms give the flowers a larger-than-life quality. The fact that the flowers have transformed over the years doesn’t take away from the effect.
It’s an especially poignant scene when one considers the circumstances in which it was painted. In the early days of his stay in Saint-Rémy, Vincent van Gogh brings the viewer into a small, confined moment in the garden that is no less vivid than his sweeping landscapes. Irises is a testament to the artist’s ability to seek and capture beauty, and to elevate the everyday into something exquisite.
Related essays from The Crossroads Gazette:
“Irises,” Getty Museum Collection, https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103JNH.
Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Thursday May 9, 1889, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, Van Gogh Museum, letter 772.
Sonja Anderson, “Vincent van Gogh’s Brilliant Blue ‘Irises’ Were Originally Purple, New Research Reveals,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 20, 2024, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/van-goghs-famous-blue-irises-were-originally-purple-180985499/.
Martin Bailey, “Kernel of truth: pollen cone stuck in paint reveals where Van Gogh’s Irises grew,” The Art Newspaper, May 31, 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/05/31/kernel-of-truth-pine-pollen-cone-stuck-in-paint-reveals-where-van-goghs-irises-grew.
John Rewald, The History of Impressionism: Fourth, Revised Edition (Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 538.
Rewald, History of Impressionism, 549.
Excellent piece Nicole and of course the same is true of his well-known 'Bedroom'
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/feb/15/science-van-gogh-bedroom-colors-paintings?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Beautiful storytelling.