Irises at the Getty

Irises have always been unique flowers with a profound meaning and an intriguing history.

Artists have found inspiration in these expressive flowers for centuries, and among the most famous depictions of irises is one of the most beloved paintings in the Getty Museum’s collection: Van Gogh’s Irises.

The Dutch painter associated these flowers with Provence, a region in southern France where they grow in abundance, and Japan, a country Van Gogh never visited but whose prints of irises he admired.

Van Gogh was fascinated by complementary contrast: the idea that a color looks brighter and more vivid if paired with its opposite on the color wheel. As paintings curator Scott Allan writes, “Irises is all about the play of complementaries: the pale green leaves against the reddish earth, and the blue-violet irises against the orange and yellow flowers in the background. Amidst these strong colors, a lone white iris stands out. Is its purpose mainly pictorial, to provide a moment of visual respite and contrast? Or is it symbolic of something deeper, a figure perhaps for Van Gogh’s own loneliness, isolation, and spiritual suffering, as many people like to think?”

The word “iris” comes from the ancient Greek for rainbow. It’s the name of the swift-footed messenger of the Olympian gods. In Greek vase paintings, Iris is usually depicted with wings to denote her sudden appearance from the heavens. She has much in common with Hermes, and, like him, is sometimes shown with a herald's rod (kerykeion). Her role as a messenger makes the iris flower a symbol of eloquence as well.

“Perhaps the difficulty we encounter in pinning down Iris’s identity goes to the heart of her significance for the ancient Greeks: she is fleeting and elusive, just like the rainbow with which she shares her name,” says David Saunders, Getty’s associate curator of antiquities.

The iris is also a muse to photographers. In 1896, the Japanese artist Ogawa Kazumasa published the book Some Japanese Flowers which features 38 collotypes—a printing technique that has the ability to reproduce the fine details of a photograph—depicting different flowers native to Japan, including Japanese irises. “The irises, like most of the flowers in Ogawa’s book, are presented alone in front of a plain background so as not to distract from the flowers themselves,” writes Megan Catalano, curatorial assistant for photographs.