Most of Van Gogh's best-known paintings carry real sadness. This one was painted purely out of joy, to celebrate a new baby in his family.
What you're looking at
Painted in 1890, Almond Blossoms shows delicate white flowers and dark branches set against a bright blue sky, filling the canvas edge to edge. Van Gogh made this painting specifically to celebrate the birth of his nephew, also named Vincent, the son of his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo.
A gift shaped by Japanese prints
Throughout his career, Van Gogh admired Japanese woodblock prints, collecting them and studying their flat color, bold outlines, and cropped, close-up compositions. Almond blossoms held particular meaning in that tradition as a symbol of new life and awakening, arriving early in spring before other trees bloom. Van Gogh borrowed that flattened, graphic sense of design directly into this painting: the branches are drawn with clean, confident outlines against a single unbroken field of blue, closer to a print than to his usual thickly layered brushwork.
The painting hung in Theo and Jo's home above their baby's crib, a detail that turns this particular canvas into one of the more purely happy objects in Van Gogh's short, difficult life.
One detail to look for
Look at how the blossoms cluster more densely near the edges of the canvas, almost bursting out of frame, while the sky in the center stays open and calm.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original, so what you're hanging is honestly scaled to the painting Van Gogh actually made. Shop the canvas print.