Almond Blossoms

The story of Almond Blossoms

Branches of white almond blossom fill the frame against a sky of flat, even turquoise, with no ground and no horizon, as if you were lying beneath the tree looking up. Van Gogh painted it in February 1890 at Saint-Rémy when his brother Theo wrote that a son had been born and named Vincent after him. He meant it for the baby's bedroom. The branches are drawn with a Japanese print's clarity, the blossoms are laid on in thick knots of white and pink, and the whole thing is an act of tenderness from a man who did not have many months left. It hangs in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

This is the Van Gogh people choose when they want joy without noise. The palette is turquoise, white, soft pink, and the dark bronze-green of the branches, and it brightens any room it enters. It is a favorite for nurseries and children's rooms, for obvious reasons, and it also suits bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and sunrooms, and it fits Scandinavian, Japanese-influenced, coastal, and soft-modern interiors. We offer it up to the Medium at 20.3 × 16 in, the size that lets the branches spread the way they do in the original, and the Petite at 13.9 × 11 in is right above a crib or a changing table.

Van Gogh's Irises is the same year's other flower painting and its natural companion. Hiroshige's Plum Park in Kameido is the Japanese print that taught him to draw branches like this, and The Starry Night is the same sky at night. More from Vincent van Gogh.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Amsterdam canvas, with the turquoise matched to the museum reference rather than the greener versions that circulate.