Did you know?

Wouter van der Veen, renowned Van Gogh specialist, art historian and author, highlights four things that you must know about the Flower Plum Orchard.

• Japanese art was originally promoted by modern literature in the 1860’s. It proved groundbreaking for the development of realism in pictorial art, which wasn’t undisputed and was considered by conservative critics as absolute filth.
  
  
• During the first spring Van Gogh spent in the South of France, in 1888, Van Gogh declared he “saw Japan everywhere”. The outlines, the simplified colors, the peaceful compositions depicting daily life that characterize Japanese engravings of the ukiyo-e movement deeply informed his eye.
  
  
• Van Gogh was an enthusiast collector of Japanese engravings. He bought hundreds of them and decorated his studio with the ones he preferred.
  
  
• Although he loved the subject, blossoming trees will appear only scarcely in his paintings of 1889 in Saint-Rémy de Provence. One spectacular exception is “Blossoming almond branches”, a masterpiece he created for his newborn nephew, Vincent Willem Van Gogh. A mental crisis prevented him from making more views of the orchards that surrounded the asylum he stayed in.