The Lightning Conductor
Vincent van Gogh wasn’t painting a pretty garden for a postcard in 1889. He was locked behind the stone walls of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The world outside was obsessed with the iron skeleton of the new Eiffel Tower and the roar of industrial progress. Inside the converted monastery, the air smelled of rosemary, lavender, and the metallic tang of drying oil paint. Vincent was fighting for his sanity with a brush.
He called Irises the lightning conductor for his illness. He believed that as long as he could continue to paint, he could keep the darkness at bay. This was not a repetitive decorative pattern. Each flower in the composition is a unique individual study. He leaned heavily into the flat planes and bold outlines of Japanese woodblock prints to give the chaos of the garden a sense of structure.
While the art Kingmakers in Paris debated the merits of symbolism, Vincent was finding the divine in the dirt. Psychiatry at the time offered nothing but cold baths and long walks. Nature was the only thing that still made sense to the broken man. He captured a moment of extreme isolation that would eventually become a trophy of the art market, selling for a record 53.9 million dollars nearly a century later. It remains a testament to the desperate act of self-preservation through color.
References
Brooks, Ronald. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Penguin Classics, 1997.
Pickvance, Ronald. Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986.
Lyons, Lisa and J. Paul Getty Museum. Irises: Vincent van Gogh. Getty Publications, 1992.
Hulsker, Jan. The Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches. Harry N. Abrams, 1980.