THE ORCHARD
By VINCENT VAN GOGH
"THE ORCHARD" (23.6"/31.8" inches) oil on canvas, Painted by VINCENT VAN GOGH in March 1888 (Arles). Collected by V. W. van Gogh, Laren.
THE orchard in blossom, VAN GOGH'S first welcoming encounter in the South. To which he had come in expectation of a healing, revitalizing nature, was for him an intoxicating vision, & it is this ecstasy that, pervading his work, sets from the familiar Impressionist joy in light and atmospheric colour.
The trees raise to the sky a broad mass of immaterial whiteness & pinkness more a loating emanation than a mass scattered & suspended in a sky of equally varied tones & playing against the interspersed phantom leafage and nerve thin branchings which in places acquire a visionary aspect that recalls both Far Eastern painting & the discreet beauty and tenderness of the distant elements in early Western landscapes.
All this intricate upper region of the picture blossoms, sky & arboreal network coalesces into an overpowering pungency & intoxi cation of the senses in which the observer must lose himself. Without apparent order, an explosion of fragrance radiates & expands, filling its space, like the long horizontal clouds, in vaguely suggested diagonal & vertical directions.
In contrast to the enchanting diffuseness of the upper zone, the lower half of the picture is more solid & stable, with large areas of green & reddish colour & the sturdiness of the irregular tree trunks, whose recurrent blue verticals repeat in colour & oppose in direction the blue bandings of the sky.
But here too is a palpitation of feeling realized in the streaking of colour, the reds & the yellows a streaking which in its deliberate verticality provides a contrast to the upper zone & yet retains something of the latter's freedom & reverie through the shapeless or unstressed patterning of the areas which they form.
Uncommitted to the technique of a school VAN GOGH'S brushwork ranges from these neatly aligned strokes of red to the thick formless patches which convey in a magical undefinable manner the quality of blossoms in the air.
VINCENT VAN GOGH PAINTINGS