1889

The record dates Irises to 1889, the year in which the catalogue's chronology moves from Arles to Saint-Rémy. Five works here name irises in their titles, spread across 1888, 1889 and 1890 — one in the Arles year, two in 1889 and two in the last year.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 71 x 93 cm and is held by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The measured palette is unusually specific: green, blue and turquoise, in that order. Turquoise registers as a dominant family in only fourteen of the 610 works in this catalogue.

A garden subject in a year of gardens

Six works dated 1889 carry "garden" in the title, several of them naming the garden of the Saint-Paul hospital directly. Whether this canvas belongs to that enclosure is not stated by the record, and it is not asserted here. What the record does establish is the shape of the year: 116 painted works, a vocabulary of olive trees, wheat, hospital grounds and cut or growing flowers, and a palette in which green has become the second most common dominant family after yellow — 53 works of the 116, against twelve in the whole of 1885.