Landscape with Olive Tree and Mountains in the Background

In the spring of 1889 Van Gogh admitted himself to the asylum at Saint-Remy, in the south of France, after the breakdown that had cost him part of his ear. He was allowed out to paint in the countryside, and through that autumn he worked again and again among the olive groves below the low chain of hills called the Alpilles. The olive trees mattered to him. He had tried and given up paintings of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, deciding he could not honestly paint the figure, and turned instead to the trees themselves, twisting and silver, as the thing he could actually see. Ground, branches, and mountains are all worked in the same restless, rolling strokes he used all through that autumn.