The past two weekends, while sitting at my desk, I’ve found myself staring eagerly out of the large window of my study. There’s a small courtyard outside and a tree that stands in the middle of it. And as the days slowly grow longer and full of more sunlight, I keep watching this tree for signs of small blossoms. When I’m downstairs and up close to it, I can see the tight little buds that have already emerged.
We are in that sliver of time when spring is officially here but we are hungrily awaiting more signs of it, anticipating that moment when the season seems to fully burst forth with all the colours and smells of leaves and blossoms.
Spring always feels to me like nature’s annual parade, one that calls us to join a celebration of new life and new possibilities. This year I realise how desperate I am for this display — not only because of the long winter but because it feels like we could all benefit from a reminder of the world’s beauty.
Nothing can or should minimise the seriousness of recent news, from political upheaval to wars and disasters. But maybe one of the gifts of spring, and this spring especially, is that even when life feels fraught and challenging, the non-human, natural world can point us towards moments of relief, and opportunities for embracing a richer existence.
I’ve always loved Van Gogh’s 1890 painting “Almond Blossom”, which is housed at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It is a close-up rendering of the flowering branches of an almond tree, set against a backdrop of blue sky. The palette for the branches is a mix of greens and blues and olive brown, dotted with white petals and soft pink flowering buds. Van Gogh was inspired by Japanese prints to paint the tree from this perspective, as if the viewer is looking up from below, and inhaling the visual details along with the jasmine-like scent.
Yet Van Gogh had his own love of springtime and its trees. He began a series of almond blossom works in 1888 after arriving in Arles, in the south of France. And the early spring proved so inspiring that he was said to have created 14 paintings within his first month. This particular work was painted in February 1890 as a gift for Van Gogh’s newborn nephew, a symbol of new birth and new life.
Gazing at the painting, I find there is something sensual and suggestive of life expanding beyond the frame. Van Gogh’s focus on these branches and the clusters of opening petals reminds me of how spring can be such a generous season. Everything seems to grow in abundance, as if nature is tripping over itself to prove that the earth is still living, having been dormant for so long.
I love the fact that this painting was a gift from Van Gogh to his brother’s newly growing family, as though the artist found the generosity of spring contagious. It’s a beautiful thought, and it makes me wonder whether we, too, could find ourselves overwhelmed enough by this season to imitate its munificence. What might it look like for each of us to observe where spring is revealing its generosity, and how we are benefiting from it, and then imagining ways in which we might be generous to the people, or the world, around us?
Claude Monet was another artist inspired by the season. In 1872 he painted “Springtime” also known as “The Reader”, now held at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. His first wife Camille Doncieux, who also modelled for Édouard Manet and Auguste Renoir, sits reading a book beneath a canopy of green leaves. She is painted as a young woman, symbolic to me of the vitality of spring, the skirt of her pale pink dress spreading out like a blanket on a patch of grass.
Less invested in creating an exact likeness of the tree or even the grass, Monet instead uses dabs of unblended colour to create the appearance of bright sunlight falling in the foreground of the painting and slipping through the leaves behind Camille. We can also see a patch of sunlight on the right of the canvas towards the back. This acts in a way like a boundary, creating a private alcove of shade for Camille. She is shown in quiet solitude, feeding her mind and her spirit.
Spring is a time to honour our own unique needs for nourishment and to make time for whatever it is that seems to breathe fresh or new life into ourselves. In some charming and sensitive way, the season offers us an invitation to reacquaint ourselves with all other aspects of the natural world.
Over the course of 10 years, between 1563 and 1573, the 16th-century Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo created a set of four paintings to represent the seasons for Maximilian II the Holy Roman Emperor. Although Arcimboldo created stained-glass images and painted frescoes, he is best known for his portraits painted using a composition of fruits, vegetables, tree roots and books.
“Spring”, painted in 1563, is housed at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Spain. It is the profile of a person’s face and shoulders created out of an arrangement of flowers and leaves. A head of hair is made from a colourful bouquet of flowers. A single white lily sticks out at the back like a stray rebellious lock. On the flower-filled face, small red rosebuds form the lips, and fully opened roses are the cheeks. A necklace of daisies makes up the collar and the figure wears a shirt created from a variety of green leaves.
What I love most about this work is that it reminds me, albeit symbolically, that humans are not separate from nature. We, too, are part of the natural world. And that we should expect to learn from and imitate other aspects of this environment in order to flourish into fuller versions of ourselves. With this seed of thought planted in our minds, where else might we discover new life lessons? Spring is just a beginning.
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