Flowers and plants in painting split into eight families: roses, lilies, flower still lifes, trees, forests, mushrooms, waterfalls and the wider living world. Each has its own guide on the site and its own logic, from a bouquet no garden ever grew to a waterfall shown as a ticketed attraction.
Painted flowers are rarely quite what they seem. Some were arranged from blooms that never opened together, and some have changed color since the painter put them down.
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In May 1890, in his last week at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted a vase of pink roses. On 13 May he wrote to his brother Theo that he had just finished the second Roses. The canvas that hangs today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York shows flowers that are almost white.
The picture hung in his mother's house until her death in 1907, and by then the once pink roses in her vestibule were described as white. Its companion, now in Washington, was still listed in a 1939 exhibition as White Roses. The pink has drained from the petals, and from the table beneath them, and Van Gogh had nothing to do with it.
The reason sits in a paint box, and it is only the first surprise. A rose could cost a painter a shipment of petals. A bouquet could be an arrangement no garden ever had in bloom at once. A waterfall could be sold at the door as an evening's entertainment.
What You'll Discover
Why his pink roses turned white.
Why one lily means two things.
The bouquet no garden ever grew.
How a tree became pure line.
Why mushrooms mean death and luck.
What a waterfall was worth at the door.