Vincent van Gogh – Irises, 1889 | Giclée Print

Van Gogh painted this in the first week after he admitted himself to the asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, outside Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in May 1889. He was not yet allowed beyond the walls, so he painted what was inside them: a bed of irises in the garden. He called painting «the lightning conductor for my illness» and worked without a preparatory drawing, straight onto the canvas.

The composition owes its flatness and its cropped edges to the Japanese woodblock prints he collected. Every plant is different — leaves crossing, bending, doubling back — and one white iris stands alone at the left edge. His brother Theo sent the painting to the Salon des Indépendants that September. Its first owner was the critic Octave Mirbeau, who wrote of how well Van Gogh had understood «the exquisite nature of flowers».

A note on the colour. The irises were painted with a red lake pigment mixed into the blue, so they read violet when they left the easel. That red has faded over a century and more, and the flowers are bluer today than Van Gogh saw them. We print the canvas as the museum photographs it now, and we say so rather than inventing the violet back.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the J. Paul Getty Museum's own open-access photograph of the canvas. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 74.3 × 94.3 cm / 29.3 × 37.1 in — oil on canvas, The J. Paul Getty Museum
80 × 60 cm / 31.5 × 23.6 in — reduced, 0.68× original. Image 63.84 × 50.40 cm.
50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — reduced, 0.45× original. Image 42.00 × 33.16 cm.

Why there is no original size here. Everywhere else in this shop the first size is the size of the object in the museum. A canvas is a different case: we do not have paper that wide, and a painting is not a sheet. So both sizes are reductions, and we say by how much rather than leaving you to guess.

Why the side margins are wider on the large sheet. The canvas is a little squarer than an 80 × 60 sheet. Rather than crop the picture to fill the paper, we set the top and bottom margins to the house measure and let the sides come out wider — 8.1 cm each. It reads as a mount, which is what a print room would give it anyway.

The canvas is reproduced whole, edge to edge. Nothing is cropped.

Provenance
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), Irises, 1889; oil on canvas, 74.3 × 94.3 cm.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Acc. No. 90.PA.20.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph under the Getty Open Content Program.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.