These roses look white and cream today, painted in wide, sweeping strokes against a green vase and a soft background. Van Gogh actually called them pink.
What you're looking at
Van Gogh painted this vase of roses in May 1890, in the days right before he left the Saint-Rémy asylum where he had spent the previous year. It's one of four still life paintings of flowers he made in that same short stretch of time, working in loose, confident, sweeping brushstrokes across the background and the bouquet alike.
Pink roses, painted just before they faded
Research from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns this painting, notes that the blossoms have faded significantly. Van Gogh used a red lake pigment that is chemically fugitive, meaning it breaks down with light exposure over time, and it has paled from pink to nearly white across most of the bouquet. In a letter, Van Gogh himself described the arrangement as pink roses set "against a yellow-green background, in a green vase" — a color relationship that's much softer today than the one he originally painted.
It's the same fugitive-pigment story that runs through several of Van Gogh's late paintings, including the lilac-to-blue walls of his Bedroom. This particular bouquet has a companion piece too: a vertical Irises hangs in Amsterdam, and a horizontal version of Roses hangs in Washington, D.C.
One detail to look for
Look at the background behind the flowers. Van Gogh's own words describe it as yellow-green, and you can still see that tone underneath the broad, confident strokes he used to cover the canvas quickly.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original, 93 x 74 cm, so what you're hanging is honestly scaled. Shop the canvas print.