Roses

Across a canvas about 41 centimeters wide, a green thicket and white and pale pink roses fill the picture. Neither sky nor horizon is shown; leaves and grass are rendered with layered short strokes of the brush, so that the whole surface seems to ripple. At the lower left, a bright part like a path running through the grass leads the eye toward the thicket beyond.

Van Gogh learned from Impressionism and from ukiyo-e prints and built a distinctive style of strong color. At the end of 1888 he began living with Paul Gauguin in Arles in southern France, but soon suffered a mental breakdown. This work depicts the roses in the garden of the Saint-Remy asylum, where he was admitted in 1889. The violently undulating brushwork seen in his final works already appears here. Van Gogh died the following year, 1890.

The work first belonged to the Gachet family of Auvers-sur-Oise, then passed through the Paris dealer Paul Rosenberg, and was purchased around 1922 by Matsukata Kojiro. After being seized by the French government in 1944, it was returned to Japan in 1959 and entered the National Museum of Western Art.