Irises

Irises is an oil painting on canvas by Vincent van Gogh, painted in May 1889 in the garden of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence; it has belonged to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles since 1990.

After a series of crises in Arles, Van Gogh entered the asylum voluntarily on 8 May 1889. The head doctor, Théophile Peyron, allowed him to paint from nature in the walled garden, and within his first week there he began this canvas. He regarded it as a study, and no drawings for it are known. One of the pine cones that fall from the umbrella pines in the garden is embedded in the paint. In the year that followed he produced well over a hundred paintings at Saint-Rémy.

The close-up, cropped view, with broad zones of colour and large flowers spilling over the edges, is generally linked to the Japanese woodblock prints Van Gogh collected; he associated irises with Japan. Each bloom has its own curling silhouette, and the composition plays complementary colours against each other in the way described by the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, whose ideas Van Gogh knew. Technical study at the Getty has shown that the flowers, now blue, were originally violet: the red lake pigment mixed into them has faded, and some reds and oranges elsewhere have turned brownish. The findings were presented in the exhibition Ultra-Violet: New Light on Van Gogh's Irises (2024–25).

Theo van Gogh sent the picture to the Salon des Indépendants in September 1889, where it hung with Starry Night Over the Rhône, and wrote to his brother that it struck the eye from afar and was a beautiful study full of air and life. The critic Octave Mirbeau, one of Van Gogh's earliest supporters, bought it in 1892 from the dealer Julien Tanguy for 300 francs. In November 1987 it sold at auction for US$53.9 million, then a record for any painting, to Alan Bond, who could not pay in full; the Getty acquired it in 1990.