Olive Grove with Picking Figures

Through the second half of 1889 Van Gogh painted the olive groves around Saint-Rémy over and over, roughly 15 canvases catching the trees at different hours and seasons. This is one of the last of them, made in December on what he described as bright, cold, clear days. A man and a woman are bent to the harvest under the gnarled trees, half sunk in blue shadow, with the sky burning pale above them. He was after what he called the opposition between the changing foliage and the tones of the sky. Look into the trunks and the figure in front and you can still see the reddish underpaint he began with showing through the greens laid over it.