The Flowering Orchard

Vincent van Gogh

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Painted in the spring of 1888 during Van Gogh's highly productive period in Arles, The Flowering Orchard depicts budding fruit trees set in a Provençal orchard, their angular and elongated branches rendered with a spare, graphic elegance that reflects the artist's deep admiration for Japanese woodblock prints. The composition is distinguished by the subtle inclusion of a scythe and rake, making it one of only two works from Van Gogh's celebrated orchard series to acknowledge a human presence within the landscape. Between late March and late April of that year, Van Gogh dedicated fourteen canvases to the subject of blossoming orchards, working with extraordinary intensity across a range of sizes and styles. Executed in oil on canvas with vigorous, expressive brushwork, the painting exemplifies the Post-Impressionist synthesis of observed nature and stylized form that characterizes Van Gogh's Arles period.