Garden at Trouville

In May 1889 Van Gogh checked himself into an asylum at Saint-Rémy, in the south of France, and for a year the walls of that place set the limits of what he could paint. On his better days he was let out into the grounds, where old pines grew above a floor of tall grass and ivy. This is one of the pictures he made there. He cut the sky out completely. There is no horizon to rest on, just the trunks going up and the tangle of green and violet underfoot, worked in short strokes that never quite settle. He called these forest-floor scenes his sous-bois, French for undergrowth, and he liked how the light broke up as it came down through the leaves. He sent this canvas north to his brother Theo in Paris at the end of September 1889.