The archive / Post-Impressionism / Roses
Roses
Vincent van Gogh · 1853–1890
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about 24×36″, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 40×60″.
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The work
A hopeful farewell.
Pale blooms crowd the canvas against a field of fresh green, the complementary pairing Van Gogh leaned on again and again, each colour pushing the other forward. He worked the paint thick and fast. This was May 1890, his last days as a patient at the Saint-Rémy asylum, and Roses belonged to a small group of large flower still lifes, roses and irises, that he made before walking out the door.
Look closer
These roses were once pink.
The flowers read as white now. They began pink. Van Gogh reached for a fugitive red lake, an eosin-based pigment that loses its colour under light, and scientists studying this very canvas have confirmed the red has drained away across more than a century. So what hangs here is the ghost of his plan: pink roses set against green, the contrast he wanted, half of it gone.
Why it matters
The paint was still wet when he left.
The surface had not dried when he packed up. Van Gogh told his brother Theo the canvases would need "a good month to dry," then checked himself out of the asylum on 16 May 1890, leaving an attendant to send the pictures on after him. They scattered. In 2015 this Roses stood beside its three companion flower pieces again, together for the first time since the artist's death.
The file & the facts
- Title
- Roses
- Artist
- Vincent van Gogh
- Year
- 1890
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original
- 71 × 90 cm
- Collection
- National Gallery of Art, Washington
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · open access · National Gallery of Art, Washington — Gift of Pamela Harriman in memory of W. Averell Harriman, 1991.67.1 (CC0, courtesy)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
