A Road at Saint-Remy with Female Figure

Van Gogh painted this small canvas in December of 1889, during the year he spent as a voluntary patient in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the south of France. He had checked himself in that spring, after the breakdown in nearby Arles when he cut off part of his own ear. Between his attacks he was let out to paint the country around the hospital, and here a single woman walks a road beneath trees worked in his restless, curling strokes, the whole small scene alive with movement. It is one of many modest views he made of the roads, olive groves and cypresses just outside the asylum walls. He would leave Saint-Rémy the following spring and be dead by that summer.