Vincents Gardens

A beautifully produced gift book for gardeners and art lovers everywhere: a selection of Vincent van Gogh’s garden and flower paintings and drawings. Vincent van Gogh never owned a garden, but throughout his career he painted and drew outdoor spaces and natural objects frequently, both fascinated and stimulated by each location’s unique character. In this book Ralph Skea surveys the gardens that were most dear to Van Gogh—from the domestic havens of parsonage gardens in the Netherlands to the romance of Parisian city parks, from the blazing flower beds of Provence to the asylum gardens that provided the artist with seclusion and calm in his final months. Whether joyous paintings of plants in bloom or the intensely beautiful studies of lilacs, roses, irises, and pine trees that he produced in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, all the oils and sketches included here are monuments to the artist’s originality and poetic sensibility.

'Breathtakingly beautiful' i 'Tender and wholehearted' Helen Jukes LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR IN FINANCIAL TIMES AND I When she suddenly finds herself uprooted, heartbroken, grieving and living out of a suitcase in her late twenties, Alice Vincent begins planting seeds. She nurtures pot plants and vines on windowsills and draining boards, filling her many temporary London homes with green. As the months pass, and with each unfurling petal and budding leaf, she begins to come back to life. Mixing memoir, botanical history and biography, Rootbound examines how bringing a little bit of the outside in can help us find our feet in a world spinning far too fast.

"This superbly illustrated book traces van Gogh's development as a painter of trees, from the distinctive pollard willows of his home province of North Brabant to the cypress and olive trees of Provence to the parks of Paris. Ralph Skea discusses van Gogh's early life in the Netherlands; his first tree studies in the Dutch landscape; his paintings of trees within townscapes; his particular fascination with orchards, which led to some of his best-known and most loved paintings; and the works he completed in rural Provence."--Amazon.com.

Of the passions driving Vincent Van Gogh's extraordinary art, one of the greatest was his abiding preoccupation with flowers, gardens and the natural landscape. Living in poverty, however, he was never able to translate the breathtaking visions on his canvas into an actual garden. Now, thanks to Derek Fell's marvellous images, insightful writing and reverent adherence to Van Gogh's original botanical ideas, Van Gogh's gardens have finally come to brilliant life. Drawing inspiration from his dazzling paintings of sunflowers, irises and Provencal landscapes as well as from the eloquent letters he wrote to his brother and sister about colour harmonies and planting ideas, Fell has lovingly created and photgraphed the living embodiment of Van Gogh's singular reflections on colour and nature. More than 130 original colour photographs show the roots of his ideas in the French landscape today and reveal exactly how those ideas will look in our own backyards, including contemporary gardens that embrace such unconventional, Van Gogh-inspired pairings as geraniums with poppies and heliotrope with roses. The book also showcase twenty of the master's most stunning paintings of landscapes and flowers.

This lovely book tells the fascinating story of Vincent van Gogh's famous floral paintings.

Combines van Gogh's paintings with his own words, describing each work of art and introducing young readers to the concept of color.