Cypresses and Two Women

Van Gogh painted this in February 1890, in his last months at the asylum at Saint-Rémy in the south of France, where he had checked himself in after the breakdown in Arles. He had become fixated on cypresses. He felt no one had really looked at them properly, and wrote to his brother Theo that their proportions were as fine as an Egyptian obelisk. Here one rears up and twists like a dark green flame, with two women small beneath it. Within a few months he had left the south for Auvers, near Paris, and the picture went straight to Theo, who died the following winter. It stayed in the family until it reached the museum in Amsterdam.