The exuberant bouquets of spring flowers that punctuate Van Gogh’s work in Provence have been reunited in Van Gogh: Irises and Roses at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition brings together for the first time the quartet of flower paintings—two of irises, two of roses, in contrasting formats and color schemes—that Van Gogh made on the eve of his departure from the asylum at Saint-Rémy. In them, he sought to impart a “calm, unremitting ardor” to his “last stroke of the brush.” Conceived as a series or ensemble on a par with the Sunflower decoration he painted earlier in Arles, the group includes the Metropolitan Museum’s Irises and Roses and their counterparts: the upright Irises from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the horizontal Roses from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The presentation is timed to accord with the blooming of the

Read More: Quartet of flower paintings, two of irises, two of roses, by Van Gogh on view at the Metropolitan