Die Schlucht

Van Gogh painted this in October 1889, during the year he spent as a voluntary patient at the asylum of Saint-Paul, just outside the town of Saint-Remy in the south of France. That autumn he was walking out to the rocky Alpilles hills nearby, where he found what he called a beautiful melancholy in the worn stone, and he set down this steep ravine with two small figures almost lost at the bottom. He was short of fresh canvas. Recent examination has found another picture underneath this one, a hillside in bloom he had painted a few months earlier and then covered over. The thick, twisting strokes of the rock were laid straight on top of that abandoned spring.