Almond Blossom is often described as a painting of new life and hope. A blue sky and white blossoms, painted for a newborn nephew: its origin seems to invite that reading.
But when we follow the letters from those weeks in order, the brightness of the painting appears within a far more unsettled period than its serene surface suggests.
On 31 January 1890, Theo wrote from Paris to tell Vincent, then living in Saint-Rémy, that his son had been born. The child was named Vincent Willem. Vincent replied after receiving the news, expressing his happiness that Theo had become a father and that Jo had passed through the most critical moment safely.
On 19 February, Vincent wrote to his mother that he was working on a painting for the child: large branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky, intended for Theo and Jo’s bedroom.
Three days later, on or about 22 February, a severe attack began while he was visiting Arles. Dr Peyron informed Theo two days later. For more than a month afterward, Theo received no letter written in Vincent’s own hand. The illness interrupted not only his correspondence, but also the working days through which he had continued to order his life.
On 29 April, Vincent was able to write to Theo again. He recalled that he had fallen ill while painting the almond blossoms. Had he been able to continue, he wrote, he would have made more paintings of flowering trees. By then, the season of blossom was nearly over.
Seen beside these dates, Almond Blossom is difficult to describe simply as a declaration of recovery after suffering. Van Gogh did not paint it from a place of lasting calm. The days in which he began the picture and the days in which illness interrupted his work again stood very close together.
Nor does the painting need to be read as a premonition of his death. In February 1890, Van Gogh did not know where his life would lead. What the record allows us to say is more limited and more precise: while living with recurring illness, he took up a large canvas to make something for a child who had just entered the world.
It was not a painting made to commemorate his own recovery. It was made for someone else’s beginning.
Van Gogh’s illness and his nephew’s birth do not cancel one another. In that February, renewed illness and a newly begun life existed within the same narrow span of time.
Across the canvas, tightly closed buds, flowers just beginning to open, and blossoms already in full bloom remain together beneath the same blue sky.
