Garden in Bloom — Vincent van Gogh, Arles 1888

Where the orchard pictures of 1888 are quiet personal dedications, the Arles garden is the south at full volume — dense flowers in saturated Provençal colour, the whole register of a summer garden pushed to its limit. Van Gogh's Arles year was marked by exactly this: the desire to paint colour at its most insistent. A postcard that carries that energy into a correspondence or a room. From the Vincent van Gogh collection.