Van Gogh's Garden Picture Was Painted on a Kitchen Towel

Vincent van Gogh painted one of his summer 1890 landscapes on a striped kitchen towel. The work, Daubigny's Garden, is now held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the museum's own account of its materials has been reported in detail by The Art Newspaper.

The French name for that striped cloth is torchon, a plain towel used in kitchens. The Van Gogh Museum says the painter had probably run out of canvas for the time being, so he reached for whatever was to hand. The towelling most likely came from the kitchen of the Auberge Ravoux, the inn in Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, where he was staying.

The picture shows the garden of Charles-François Daubigny, a landscape painter whom Van Gogh admired. Soon after arriving in Auvers, Van Gogh visited Daubigny's house. On 17 June 1890 he wrote to his brother Theo that he had finished a small study of the house and garden, and that it had given him the idea for a larger canvas. The Van Gogh Museum identifies its picture as the first painting of that garden.

Turn the picture over and more of its history shows. According to The Art Newspaper, two horizontal red stripes are woven into the cloth, near the top and bottom. The wooden frame behind it, called the stretcher, is covered in small labels, each recording an exhibition where the painting was shown.

Those labels tell a travel story. The Art Newspaper reports that the painting has been lent to 105 exhibitions since 1896, and that its stretcher labels record 17 of those venues. In 1938 and 1939, it was sent to Indonesia with 13 other Van Gogh works. The artist's nephew, V.W. van Gogh, arranged for the shows in Batavia (now Jakarta), Surabaya and Bandung.

Van Gogh did not stop at the towel. After receiving proper canvas from Theo, he made two wider views of the same garden, each in the square format he preferred. Those two works are now in the Hiroshima Museum of Art in Japan and the Rudolf Staechelin Foundation collection in Switzerland.

For a visitor standing in front of the Amsterdam picture, the front is only half the record. The stripes, the stretcher labels and the list of venues show where the work has been, and who got to see it, over more than 130 years.