Corner in the Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital, A

Van Gogh arrived at the Saint-Paul asylum in May 1889, and at first was not allowed beyond its walls, so the overgrown garden became his first subject there. He wrote to his brother Theo about this edge of it, planted with tall pines whose trunks he saw as red ochre, their green foliage saddened, as he put it, by a mixture of black, all set against an evening sky. He built the tangle of bushes and grass from thick, crowded strokes, and still kept the space feeling deep and ordered. He made it within weeks of checking himself in, and these red-trunked pines would return again and again in the canvases of the year that followed.