Post-Impressionism

Irises

Van Gogh painted Irises in May 1889, just one week after checking himself into the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy — he called painting his "lightning conductor for my illness."

Vincent van Gogh · 1889

Read history Open artist

Author

J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

In 1987, Australian businessman Alan Bond bought Irises at Sotheby's for $53.9 million, a world record at the time — then it emerged he'd paid with a loan from Sotheby's itself, a scandal that changed how auction houses handled buyer financing — Sotheby's all but stopped lending money to buyers after that.

Highlights

Facts & legends

Van Gogh painted Irises in May 1889, just one week after checking himself into the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy — he called painting his "lightning conductor for my illness."
In 1987, Australian businessman Alan Bond bought Irises at Sotheby's for $53.9 million, a world record at the time — then it emerged he'd paid with a loan from Sotheby's itself, a scandal that changed how auction houses handled buyer financing forever.
Bond couldn't actually repay the loan, and the painting quietly went back on the market; the Getty Museum finally acquired it in 1990 for an undisclosed sum rumored to be lower than the auction price.
The irises van Gogh painted were originally violet-purple, not the blue you see today — the red pigment in the flowers has faded over 135 years, shifting the whole color temperature of the canvas.
Van Gogh himself never considered the painting finished or particularly significant; he referred to it in letters to his brother Theo as a "study" and initially asked Theo to keep it rather than exhibit it.
The lone white iris in the lower left — the one flower that stands apart from all the blue ones — was likely a deliberate self-portrait metaphor: the outsider among a crowd, which van Gogh wrote about explicitly to Theo.

Source: Wikidata

Estimated value

What it is worth today

Irises sold for $53.9 million in 1987 (then an absolute record); it is now at the Getty in Los Angeles and not for sale.

More details Why Van Gogh began Irises the day after entering Saint-Paul, how Japanese prints entered a Provençal garden, why the flowers turned blue, and why Theo exhibited a study its author underestimated.

It began on the second day

The garden became a first territory of freedom

Van Gogh entered Saint-Paul voluntarily on 8 May 1889 and began the garden's irises the following day.

Painting did not cure him, but work structured a year in which he produced about 130 pictures.

At Saint-Paul the artist received a bedroom and another room as a studio. The garden lay between confinement and work, making irises, lilac, and ivy accessible and safe first subjects. Van Gogh called work a 'lightning conductor' for illness, but never confused discipline with miraculous cure: he painted between attacks and after them.

Every flower behaves differently

Repetition becomes a crowd of characters

Bent, open, hidden, and solitary white flowers resist a botanical pattern.

The radical crop and firm outlines recall Japanese prints Van Gogh admired.

The white iris is often made a symbol of Van Gogh's loneliness, although he left no such interpretation. More securely it is a compositional interruption: one pale flower halts the rhythm of blue heads like a pause in a sentence. Individuality comes from observation—no two leaves or bends fully repeat.

The blue irises were violet

Light changed the central color idea

Getty research found that a red component faded, turning originally violet flowers blue.

Their lost purple once made a stronger complementary contrast with the yellow-green ground.

Colour changed gradually after completion. The red component of the violet mixture proved more light-sensitive than the blue. Today's cool harmony is historically altered but now belongs to the object's biography. Getty reconstruction proposes the initial contrast without repainting age: the museum preserves both intention and time on the surface.

He called it a study

Theo saw a finished painting first

Van Gogh described the work as a study and no preparatory drawings are known.

Theo sent it with Starry Night to the 1889 Salon des Indépendants, praising its air and life.

Van Gogh called the canvas a study rather than an unquestioned masterpiece. Theo judged differently: from the summer shipment he selected Irises with The Starry Night for the Salon des Indépendants in September 1889. Its first public context therefore paired an earthly garden with the night cosmos of the same difficult year.

The garden remained in the paint

Scientists returned to the site 135 years later

Getty researchers matched terrain and historical evidence to identify the likely garden viewpoint and examined plant traces caught in wet paint.

The image is freely composed, yet rooted in a particular corner seen during Van Gogh's first days of confinement.

In 1987 Irises became a newspaper sensation after a record auction sale to businessman Alan Bond; the financing failed and the painting returned to its creditor. Getty acquired it in 1990. Market drama is loud, but museum value is different: pigments, letters, Japanese influence, and the start of Saint-Rémy converge in one object.

Official sources