Landscape with Rabbits

Van Gogh painted this in December 1889 inside the asylum at Saint-Remy, where he had committed himself the year before after the breakdown in Arles. Between attacks he was allowed to paint, and in the grounds he kept finding these close, tangled patches of undergrowth with no horizon and no sky, just leaves, grass and a twisting trunk filling the whole canvas. Two rabbits sit half hidden in the growth, easy to miss at first. The brushwork drives in every direction, thick and restless, the yellows and greens laid down in short strokes. He made it during one of the calmer spells of a year in which he produced some of his most intense work.