Flowers

Thirty flower paintings from Van Gogh's most productive years — the Parisian still lifes that taught him to use color, through the iconic Sunflowers series painted in the Yellow House at Arles, to the final irises and roses of Saint-Rémy. Flowers were Van Gogh's laboratory: he used them to experiment with complementary colors, with thick impasto, with the expressive potential of brushwork. The Sunflowers, painted to decorate Gauguin's bedroom, became his signature image — chrome yellow against pale yellow, a study in monochrome that somehow contains the entire warmth of the Mediterranean sun. The Irises, painted in the asylum garden, pulse with a violet-blue energy that feels almost electrical. Every petal, every stem, every leaf is rendered with a devotion that transforms botanical observation into something approaching prayer.