Van Gogh Flowering Plum Tree Tie

Flowering Plum Tree (Blossoming Plum Tree, after Hiroshige) by Vincent Van Gogh, oil on canvas 1887, is a landscape painting of a view looking through the branches of a plum tree onto an orchard of trees covered in white flower blossoms, which the artist lovingly copied from a print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Hiroshige. Like many Impressionist painters, Van Gogh avidly studied and collected Japanese prints, as their bold contours, flat areas of colour, methods of composition, and lack of shadows contributed greatly to the painter's mature, Post-Impressionist style. Van Gogh altered the colours of the original Hiroshige print and framed the composition in a painted decorative border with calligraphic Japanese characters. The compositional scheme of the expressive contours of the silhouetted tree branches which fill the composition was a device that Van Gogh utilized in many later paintings.