Van Gogh's Irises Were Once Pink and Purple. Why They Faded

Van Gogh painted irises in a field near Arles, in the asylum garden at Saint-Rémy and in two vase paintings, and red paint that fades in light runs through all four. ^[1][5][6][7] The two vases of May 1890 were made as a pair, one on pink and one on lemon yellow. ^[4][5] The table puts each painting next to Van Gogh’s own description of it.

Van Gogh entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1889 and, according to the Getty, began Irises within the first week, working from nature in the garden. ^[2] On 9 May he told Theo and Jo he had “violet irises” and a lilac bush on the go: “Two subjects taken from the garden.” ^[3] The canvas is oil, 74.3 by 94.3 centimeters. ^[2]

Getty scientists scanned it with X-ray fluorescence and found bromine in many of the petals. Bromine points to geranium lake, the red Van Gogh mixed with blue to make violet. Light early in the painting’s history faded that red and left only the blue. ^[1]

The bromine map became a template for recreating the violet digitally, and the team also corrected yellows in the upper left that originally appeared more orange. Then they reproduced its texture with 3D imaging and printing. The work was shown in Ultra-Violet: New Light on Van Gogh’s Irises at the Getty Center, from October 1, 2024, to March 9, 2025. ^[1] The Getty has owned the painting since 1990 ^[2], and what Irises is worth tells the story of its sales.

A year later, on 11 May 1890, Van Gogh wrote that he was working on two canvases of large bouquets of violet irises, “one lot against a pink background in which the effect is harmonious and soft through the combination of greens, pinks, violets.” ^[4] That pink-ground picture is the Met’s Irises, examined in a 2017 study by scientists from the Met, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the University of Antwerp. ^[5]

Today the background reads as white. At its edge the team found eosin red lake applied wet on wet with lead white. They concluded that the white surface is “part of the pink layer beneath and that it presently looks white due to fading of the eosin red lake.” Van Gogh had ordered eosin under the name geranium lake as soon as he reached Arles. ^[5]

The flowers changed too: “Fading of the red lakes has resulted in pink paints that now look white and in purple paints that now look blue.” ^[5] The Met reunited the four May 1890 still lifes in 2015, with digital color simulations. ^[5]

The other bouquet in that letter stood “against a striking lemon yellow background,” an effect, he wrote, “of terribly disparate complementaries that reinforce each other by their opposition.” ^[4] The edition’s notes identify it as F 678, the Van Gogh Museum’s Irises on a yellow background, 92.7 by 73.9 centimeters. ^[4][6]

The museum’s label is plain: “The irises were originally purple. But as the red pigment has faded, they have turned blue.” ^[6] So both halves of the pair lost their red. The soft harmony lost its pink, and the hard contrast of violet against yellow lost much of its violet. ^[5][6]

The earliest picture, painted in Arles in May 1888, shows the same problem outdoors. On 12 May Van Gogh described “a ditch with iris plants with green leaves, with purple flowers.” Researchers note that most of the irises in Field with Irises near Arles now “appear more bluish than purple due to fading of the red pigments,” and that he used the very light-sensitive reds cochineal and eosin here. ^[7]

In December 2014, Dutch News reported that researchers at Tilburg University, the Van Gogh Museum and the government’s cultural heritage service had found the blue irises were once purple. Senior museum researcher Ella Hendriks believed that, without action, the pigment would fade completely within a few decades. ^[9]

The Van Gogh Museum's REVIGO project then rebuilt this painting's colors. The team recreated the paints Van Gogh used from old recipes, photographed the canvas with a hyperspectral camera to work out the paint mix at each point, and swapped each faded mix for its original shade. The result shows a variety of purple irises, not the blue flowers we see now, against a more intensely yellow field, and it found that the white dots at the bottom had been pink. ^[10]

Not every change here is chemical. Between 2013 and 2015 the museum removed surface dirt and a varnish added in a 1927 restoration; the painting was meant to stay unvarnished. ^[7] The label sums it up: “The colours are now much brighter.” ^[8]

The Van Gogh Museum's researchers searched his letters for “violet,” “lilac,” “purple” and “pink,” then looked at the paintings. In many cases the first three have given way to blue, and the pink has become off-white, because he mixed unstable red lakes with blue and white. ^[10] Another case is the Met's Roses: red lake turned up in roses that now look white. ^[5]

The museum's reconstruction of The Bedroom shows the effect starkly. It showed that the strikingly blue walls and doors were originally purple, and the floor a harder red. Many people found it hard to accept. ^[10]

Not on the canvas. The Getty describes light as having “irrevocably changed” some colors of its Irises. ^[1] Eosin and brazilwood are the most fugitive red lakes Van Gogh used, and the worst fading tends to happen where they are mixed with lead white or zinc white, exactly as in these pinks. ^[5]

So the recoveries are digital. The Met showed color simulations in 2015, the Revigo project rebuilt Van Gogh’s paints in the lab to visualize the Arles field, and the Getty made a recolored digital model of its Irises. ^[1][5][7] Dutch News reported in 2014 that the paintings would not be restored to their original color, and that the digital reconstructions could help decide how museum lighting should change. ^[9]

For a related story about red and yellow paint, see whether Van Gogh’s Sunflowers are fading. For more of the subject, browse Van Gogh’s flower paintings or read what Van Gogh said about flowers.