See Soaring Sunflowers and Radiant Roses That Bring Vincent van Gogh’s Paintings to Life
Featuring 18,000 plants and works by three contemporary artists, a new exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden celebrates the Dutch painter’s love of nature
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Between May 1889 and May 1890, Vincent van Gogh was a self-admitted patient at a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, a small town in the south of France.
During his stay, van Gogh painted what was most accessible to him, such as an enclosed wheat field he could see from the window and interior scenes of the mental hospital. He also painted flowers—lots of them.
Soon after he entered the hospital, van Gogh painted Irises, a tightly packed frame of blue flowers dappled with spots of yellow and orange. Just before he left, he painted Roses, a composition featuring a bouquet of pink roses in a green vase.
While the color of the roses’ pigment has since faded to white, they appear once again in vivid pink in a metalwork sculpture by Amie Jacobsen at “Van Gogh’s Flowers,” an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). The show features the living flowers that inspired van Gogh, as well as monumental reinterpretations by contemporary artists.
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“The artist’s relationship to nature is legendary, so it’s our perfect dream show,” Michaela Wright, NYBG’s director of exhibition content and interpretation, tells ABC7’s Kemberly Richardson. “He loved the color contrast that they brought, violet purple with a splash of yellow at the center, and every spring he turned his brush to the irises.”
Three-dimensional sculptures like Jacobsen’s, which also depict irises, imperial fritillaries and oleanders, as seen in van Gogh’s work, flesh out the natural aesthetics of the flowers while also paying tribute to the painter’s unique vision.
Each piece took months to craft with a small team of assistants. “Creating a sculpture that’s responding to a painting that’s responding to nature is really fun,” Jacobsen explains to Time Out’s Laura Ratliff.
On the conservatory lawn, larger-than-life sunflower sculptures by Cyril Lancelin are interspersed with real, blooming flowers. Lancelin, a French artist who visited the sunflower fields that inspired van Gogh, created flowers that range between five and 15 feet tall, per the New York Times’ Jane L. Levere. Making sure the real flowers bloomed in time for the exhibition’s debut was a challenge for the botanical garden’s staff.
“The institutional calendar opens the exhibition in late May and we wanted to plant in late April, so the plants could be mature, but that doesn’t work well for a sunflower,” Brian Sullivan, NYBG’s vice president of landscape and glasshouses, tells Gothamist’s Hannah Frishberg.
Sunflowers tend to bloom later in the summer, so the gardeners had to turn to ProCut sunflowers, which were developed for year-round flower-selling. As it happened, this kind “proved perfectly suited to be grown and flower outdoors in the Bronx in late spring,” Sullivan tells the Times.
Throughout the summer, the botanical garden will feature a total of 32 types of sunflowers, including the Mammoth, which can reach more than ten feet tall, and the aptly named Vincent’s Choice, rich with color.
In addition to Jacobsen and Lancelin, the botanical garden is featuring the work of Graphic Rewilding, an artistic duo who seek to serve as an “artistic counterbalance to the severe lack of green space in cities,” per a statement from the botanical garden.
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The two artists, Catherine Borowski and Lee Baker, created Irises on Yellow Columns and His Flowers in the Round. Both emerge from reflecting pools and appear to spill outwards towards visitors.
“We felt like if we somehow used irises to recreate the New York skyline we could create something that felt like it not only competed with but also blended with the huge palms that were in here,” Baker tells Gothamist of Irises on Yellow Columns.
These works, alongside 18,000 plants grown for the exhibition, will join the more than one million plants typically on display at the botanical garden in the Bronx, New York City’s greenest borough.
“Folks can actually walk through and smell the smells that van Gogh would have been experiencing, see the oranges dripping off the trees,” Wright tells ABC7. “It’s magnificent.”
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The result is an immersive experience that retraces the inspiration van Gogh took from nature, from his days in the psychiatric hospital to his later depictions of roots and fields in Auvers-sur-Oise, where he spent his final days.
“This exhibition brings the paintings you know so well to life with the plants that inspired the artist,” NYBG CEO Jennifer Bernstein tells Time Out. “You’ve seen the paintings—now see them come to life in the garden.”
“Van Gogh’s Flowers” is on view at the New York Botanical Garden from May 24 to October 26, 2025.
