Vincent Van Gogh – Almond Branches in Bloom

Wow! What can I say about this puzzle? It was hard!

I’ve said this before but impressionist style paintings make for some challenging puzzling. Another reason this puzzle was so hard, unfortunately, was the quality of the puzzle. More on that in a bit, here’s a photo of the finished image!

I bought this puzzle for my Oma about ten or so years ago at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I wasn’t entirely sure if she liked puzzles but I thought she would like the image so I bought it for her. She did really like it but she commented how hard it was. She had worked on it for three months! Now, she won’t sit and puzzle for a long period of time like me but she wasn’t kidding. This is hard. She used to do this puzzle once a year until this past year and she said that she was finished with it. This last time around she had lost a piece but asked if I wanted to do this one again before she passed it on.

I was curious to see how I’d do a second time around. I had actually started this in the summer, but I didn’t have a foam board yet so I laid out the pieces and bits that I had assembled every time I wanted to work on it. Then I’d pack it away so the cats wouldn’t destroy it overnight. The fit is way too loose so I’d have to slip paper under each chunk and carefully put it back in the box.

I finally gave up on this and decided to put it away partially assembled until I had a board. I then neglected it for 6 months until last week. I finished it after a few puzzling sessions with much struggling with the high gloss pieces and loose fitting random cut. Somewhere along this journey a second piece was lost!

The finished puzzle really is gorgeous and so impressive to see all the detail but I have now brought this to the thrift store for some other puzzler out there to take on the challenge! 1000 pieces by Eurographics and 2 pieces missing.