The show "Van Gogh:
Irises and Roses" sheds light on the fading red

The masterpieces of painting are eternal, but the paints with which they are painted are not. This fact is most clearly illustrated by the Van Gogh: Irises and Roses show, which focuses on a small bouquet of brushes by the beloved Dutch artist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The show is unique in that here you can see four magnificent still lifes, which the artist wrote almost 125 years ago, and which were never exhibited together. (Two paintings from the Metropolitan collection, one from the National Gallery in Washington, and one from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.) Thanks to this show, we can see these paintings as the artist painted them. Unfortunately, all the paintings today have lost their original color - it is known that Van Gogh was very fond of using an orange-red shade that was unstable in time.

Van Gogh - Roses (1890)

Van Gogh on our website

The organizers of the show - Susan Alyson Stein (Susan Alyson Stein), curator of the European painting department of the Metropolitan Museum and Charlotte Hale (Charlotte Hale), one of the restorers of painting - used the latest digital technology in their work. On the slide show you can see the preserved and restored version of all four paintings.

In May 1890, Van Gogh was about to leave the asylum in Saint-Remy, where he spent a year recovering from a fit of mental illness. In less than a week, before moving to Auvers, he completed four paintings, almost identical in size (29 by 36 inches). As he wrote to Theo’s brother, on two canvases he depicted irises, on two more - roses, in horizontal and vertical position for each option. They remained in St. Remy so that the paint could dry, and were sent to Auvers in late June.

It is no secret that often the development of painting is due to key changes in the processing of paints and brushes, and that this development can be traced from Titian to Van Gogh. The main impetus to the development of the history of painting was made, of course, by Velazquez, Goya, Turner, Manet, Cezanne, Monet and Cassatt. After Van Gogh, it’s already difficult to talk about Fauvism and German expressionism without mentioning his quick, rich, energetically charged manner of writing. its strength is clearly visible in a variety of strokes, the use of brushes of various widths. The strokes for the background, as a rule, are wider, the foreground is drawn more carefully and the strokes in the corners of the picture are like swirls of fractal energy.

But the pictures that we see today are not quite the same as those painted by Van Gogh. He used one of the red pigments obtained from synthetic dye, knowing that it could disappear. He mixed it with blue to get purple irises and used it to add shades of red to a bouquet of white roses. He mixed it with white to get a pink background for a horizontal still life and for a pink table in a vertical still life with roses.

Van Gogh lost the bet with chemistry. The red pigment has faded over the years. The most decomposed is the one that was mixed with other colors. Irises turned from violet to blue. Roses have become almost completely white, as was once the pink background and table. This fact may seem overly melodramatic, but the colors in Van Gogh’s paintings disappeared almost 3 months after his death. Even experts agree that he could choose a much more durable pigment, but did not.

Anna Sidorova © Gallerix.ru