Bulb Fields

Bulb Fields, also known as Flower Beds in Holland, is an oil painting on canvas mounted on wood by Vincent van Gogh, made around 1883 during his time in The Hague; it is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

Van Gogh had settled in The Hague at the end of 1881, and this picture belongs to his second year there. It has been described as his first garden painting. It shows the beds of a Dutch bulb grower: rectangular plots of blue, yellow, pink, red and white hyacinths, each planted in a single colour, stretch away from a low viewpoint like a patchwork, towards thatched cottages and leafless trees under a cloudy sky, while a small figure walks across the beds. The regular grid of plots allowed Van Gogh to explore his interest in perspective.

The canvas measures 48.9 × 66 cm. It was probably among the early works Van Gogh left at his parents' house in Nuenen when he moved on in November 1885; his widowed mother took them with her to Breda in 1886, where they were stored by the carpenter Adrianus Schrauwen. In 1902 the contents were sold off as rubbish and dispersed through local hands. Consigned in 1904 to the Kunsthandel Oldenzeel in Rotterdam, where it was shown as Tulpenland (tulip land) although the flowers are hyacinths, it was bought in 1905 by Jan Smit of Kinderdijk and passed after his 1919 sale to his grandson John Enthoven. Dealers in the Netherlands and New York handled it in 1954, and in January 1955 M. Knoedler & Co. sold it to Paul Mellon, who gave it to the National Gallery of Art in 1983.