Mountains at Saint-Rémy

Van Gogh painted this in July 1889 from inside the asylum of Saint-Paul at Saint-Rémy, where he had checked himself in after cutting his ear in Arles. The heaving, twisted range is not a symptom; it is the real limestone of the Alpilles, the low hills a short walk from the gate. He came from the flat Netherlands, and these 500-metre slopes were the first real mountains he had ever stood among. Down among the olive trees he set a dark little hut, borrowed from a novel he was reading, Édouard Rod's Le Sens de la Vie, which described the small, dark homes of mountain people. About two days after he finished it, a severe crisis came on and he tried to swallow his paints. One quiet change since: the flowers in the foreground were pink when he laid them down, and the red has faded to white.