Almond Blossom

Almond Blossom is an oil-on-canvas painting by Vincent van Gogh, made in February 1890 at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence as a gift for his newborn nephew; it is in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

On 31 January 1890 Theo van Gogh wrote to tell his brother that his wife Jo had given birth to a son. In that letter, as the museum quotes it, Theo said they would name the boy after Vincent and wished that he might be as determined and courageous as his uncle. Vincent, writing to his mother, said he would have preferred the child to be named after their father, but that he had immediately begun a picture for the baby to hang in the couple's bedroom: big branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky. Because almond trees flower very early in spring, they served him as a sign of new life.

The composition differs from the almond-blossom still lifes and orchard views Van Gogh had painted in Arles in 1888. There is no trunk or ground: branches seen from close by spread across the whole surface, cut off by the edges, with dark contours around them. The museum links the subject, the strong outlines and the placing of the tree in the picture plane to Japanese prints, which Van Gogh collected and studied. His biographer Steven Naifeh has suggested he may also have remembered his friend John Russell's Almond Trees in Blossom of 1887.

The canvas measures 73.3 × 92.4 cm. Van Gogh sent it to Theo in Paris at the end of April 1890. It stayed with the family, passing to Jo van Gogh-Bonger and to the son for whom it was painted, Vincent Willem van Gogh, who transferred it in 1962 to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation; he later founded the Van Gogh Museum, where the painting has been on permanent loan since the museum opened on 2 June 1973.