Olive Grove

Van Gogh entered the hospital at Saint-Rémy in May 1889, and within weeks he was being let out through the gate with his easel to work in the country around the town. The olive groves were what stood there. He went back to them all year, 15 canvases in the end, and kept complaining that the trees would not hold still as a colour. Old silver, he wrote, sometimes bluer, sometimes greenish, sometimes going bronze, depending on the sky above them. This is one of only three olive paintings that belong to that June, made under the flat blue that gave it its older Dutch title, an olive orchard with a bright blue sky. The rest of the group came with the autumn, and by December he was painting the pickers up in the branches.