Blossoming Almond Tree, Vincent van Gogh (1890)

VINCENT van Gogh painted  “Blossoming Almond Tree” as a gift to his brother Theo on the occasion of the birth of his son, on Jan. 31, 1890. Theo named the baby after van Gogh, who wrote to his mother:

“How glad I was when the news came… I should have greatly preferred him to call the boy after Father, of whom I have been thinking so much these days, instead of after me; but seeing it has now been done, I started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in their bedroom, big branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky.”

This painting is hard to see fresh because it is so often reproduced, and because of the inadequacy of computer images, but in person the background sky of turquoise, the different shades of pink, the twisting, thick lower branch with its flat, abstract quality are arresting. It is intensely joyful. “Blossoming Almond Tree” shows the influence of the Japanese art that Van Gogh studied and collected. It conveys the exuberance and delicacy of spring, but also an unsettling quality in its groping branch.

In van Gogh, rapture and absorption in nature alternate with despair and confinement. He once wrote to his sister that he wished to convert everything ugly in himself into physical beauty on canvas. He killed himself a few months after “Blossoming Almond Tree” was painted.

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