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In 1889 van Gogh was living at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and there wasn’t much going on.
Well, I can imagine there was a LOT going on, just nothing that would’ve been fun to paint. Empty hospital rooms got boring pretty fast, so within the first week Van Gogh started painting stuff from the asylum garden. One of the many colorful flowers that are found in southern France are irises, so he made multiple paintings of them. There are no known drawings for this one, so people think these Irises were mainly a color study. His brother Theo thought they were pretty awesome though, so he submitted the painting for the annual exhibition of Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1889.
Vincent painted Irises just before his big relapse in 1890. Funny, because this painting in particular he called "the lightning conductor for my illness". He felt that painting would keep him from going cuckoo. [Spoiler alert: it didn't.]
In 1990 the Getty museum acquired Irises for a buttload of money, but they won't tell you how much. Mr Bond (Alan not James) was the previous owner, and had tried to sell the painting privately before offering it to the Getty. At one point he offered it for roughly $65 million. What a bargain, right? He himself bought the painting for $53.9 million in 1987, making it the most expensive painting ever sold for about 2.5 years. He sold the painting trying to pay off his massive debt. George Golder, Curator of paintings at the Getty in 1990, wasn’t really looking for a van Gogh though. He just “needed more star pictures” for the collection. The Getty lucked out as this remains one of the most popular works in their collection.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Irises (painting)
Irises is an oil painting by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. Painted in 1889, the work is a landscape with a cropped composition and is one of several hundred paintings from a series of paintings that van Gogh made at the Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in the last year before his death in 1890. It has been in the permanent collection of The Getty in Los Angeles, California since 1990.
The painting depicts vibrantly blooming irises with dynamic brushstrokes. The flowers are a mix of deep blues and violets, contrasting with lush green leaves, red-orange earth, and yellow flowers in the background. Van Gogh's characteristic impasto technique adds texture and movement within the painting, creating an energetic and expressive feeling. The overall cropped composition of Irises, includes broad areas of vivid color and monumental rippled irises overflowing the borders of the canvas which helps moves the viewer's eye throughout the canvas.
Check out the full Wikipedia article about Irises (painting)
