Almond Blossoms

In February 1890, while staying at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Vincent van Gogh learned that his brother Theo had become a father. The child was named Vincent Willem — after his uncle — and Van Gogh immediately set to work on a painting to hang above the infant's crib. The result was Almond Blossoms, a large canvas showing white flowers and budding branches set against a vivid turquoise sky, a gesture of pure tenderness from one brother to another.\n\nThe composition owes a clear debt to Japanese woodblock prints, which Van Gogh had long admired. The branches are rendered flat and close to the picture plane, the flowers simplified into bold graphic shapes, the sky reduced to an unmodulated field of color. Yet the effect is anything but cold: the white petals carry a sense of fragile optimism, of life reasserting itself in early spring. Almond Blossom was so precious to Theo's wife Jo that she refused ever to sell it, and after her death it passed to her son — the elder Vincent's namesake — who would go on to found the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where the painting remains on permanent display.