Garden of the Asylum

In May 1889 Van Gogh checked himself into an asylum at Saint-Rémy, in the south of France, after the breakdown in which he cut off part of his own ear. He was not shut away from work. The doctors let him paint, and for a year his subjects were whatever lay inside the walls, chiefly this overgrown garden. He worked it through the seasons. Here the beds have gone to autumn, a great pine leans across the front, and the light comes through in the thick, ridged strokes he was laying down faster than ever that year. He wrote to his brother Theo that painting was what kept him steady. He would leave the asylum the following spring and be dead within months.