Van Gogh Irise Painting

Irise was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1889. In the asylum at Saint-Remy, between attacks, Van Gogh devoted himself to his art with a desperate determination, knowing that this alone might save him. He called painting "the lightning conductor for my illness." And observing his continued ability to paint, he felt sure that he was not really a madman. The irises are perhaps the first subject he did in the asylum. 

It preceded his first attack there and at first glance shows no evident trace of the moodiness and high tension that appear in many of the later works. He paints the flowers with admiration and joy. The profusion of elements in this close-packed picture is tamed and ordered for the eye without loss of freedom by the division of the canvas into fairly distinct, large regions of color approaching symmetry: the cold leaf-green in the middle, the iris-blue above and beneath, and in two corners the red ground and the distant warm green, touched with yellow, orange, and white. Each region has its own characteristic shapes and spotting, and all are luminous.

Interesting in the high-keyed color is that the strongest ntoe, the iris-blue, is the darkest and also has the greatest range from light to dark. In mass of color, the chief contrast is of this blue with the mild, dilute blue-green of the leaves; their complementary contrasts with red and yellow are secondary and reserved for the margins of the picture. All this helps to temper the luxuriant natural bouquet and to produce a closer, muted harmony, while preserving a gay colorfulness and richness.