Eurographics - Vincent Van Gogh, Irises 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

Van Gogh's Irises, painted in his first week at the asylum, and the one painting in the range where sorting by brushstroke direction genuinely works.

What you are looking at

Van Gogh painted Irises in May 1889, days after admitting himself to the asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole outside Saint-Remy. He called it a lightning conductor for his illness. It is oil on canvas, 71 x 93 cm, and it hangs in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

A bed of irises fills the frame: deep violet-blue blooms with orange-yellow throats and frilled falls, one white iris standing alone on the left. The leaves are long blue-green sword-shapes cutting diagonally across the whole picture. Behind the bed, a band of orange marigolds against a dark green hedge, and along the bottom, bare red-brown earth.

What it is like to build

Sort the leaves by which way the stroke runs. This is the single most useful piece of advice for any Van Gogh and it is at its clearest here. The leaves are painted in long confident strokes, each blade in one direction, and at piece scale the direction of the stroke is far more visible than the exact green. Lay out four piles, strokes running up-left, up-right, near vertical, near horizontal, and the leaf mass stops being a wall.

Take the white iris first. It is unique in the picture and it sits on the left edge, which gives you a fixed point early.

Then the blooms, which are the highest contrast: violet with a hard orange centre. Then the marigold band, a strip of pure orange across the top that closes the upper edge.

The red earth at the bottom is the hardest region, being one broad colour with only stroke direction to go on, and it should be last.

Why the EuroGraphics build matters on a Van Gogh

EuroGraphics are Canadian, based in Montreal, printing on recycled board with vegetable-based inks. This is from their Fine Art Collection and it uses their Smart Cut, which is cut for a firmer, more positive fit than their standard line. On a painting where a third of the image is one family of blue-greens, that click is what tells you the piece is right.

Specifications

A little context

Old masters and post-impressionists are a pillar of what we stock rather than a token shelf, and the useful thing to understand is that a painting is easier to build than a photograph of the same subject, not harder. A photograph of an iris bed would be a nightmare of near-identical green. A painted one carries the artist's hand, and the hand is information. For the same lesson in a completely different style, see Klimt's The Kiss. More at Art.

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