Green
Five works in which green is not a detail but the whole surface. A Prussian palm house, two gardens in the south of France, a jungle painted by a man who never left Paris, and a two-metre square of irises with no horizon in it. Each was measured before it was chosen: green has to hold at least sixty per cent of the coloured area of the sheet, and colour has to hold at least thirty per cent of the sheet. Nothing is here because it looked about right.
The five are also five different ways of arriving at green. Blechen's is glasshouse green, painted under glass in Berlin in 1834 from palms the King of Prussia had bought in Paris. Van Gogh's Poet's Garden is green pushed against a chrome-yellow sky — the greenest sheet in the shop, at ninety-five per cent coloured area. His Pont de Clichy is green broken into separate strokes beside Signac. Rousseau's jungle is green invented from hothouse plants and picture books. Monet's late irises are green as a field with no depth at all, painted when he could barely see.
Green is the colour people ask for after blue when they are furnishing a room rather than collecting pictures. These are the sheets that answer it honestly.
