Field with Irises near Arles — Vincent van Gogh, 1888

In spring 1888 the irises around Arles were at full height and Van Gogh went out to paint them in the open field — a wide landscape, not the close botanical study he would make later at Saint-Rémy. The purple foreground pushes back to farmhouses and trees; the broad sky completes the south. The painting is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. A postcard that carries the colour of the Arles spring into a letter or a small framed composition. From the Vincent van Gogh collection.