Olive Grove

Van Gogh painted this in the summer of 1889, during the year he spent as a patient at the asylum in Saint-Remy, in Provence. When he was well enough and had permission, he was let out to work in the fields nearby, and the olive groves became one of the things he came back to again and again. He described the trees to his mother as grey and silvery, like old willows, and you can watch him chasing that in the short curling strokes of the leaves and the ground, with longer lines saved for the trunks. The whole surface seems to shimmer, the way heat moves over dry land in the south. He made at least 15 olive paintings that year, several of them within sight of the hospital walls.