Olive Picking

In November 1889, from the asylum at Saint-Rémy where he had admitted himself, Van Gogh wrote a hard letter to the young painter Émile Bernard. Bernard had sent him photographs of biblical scenes composed out of his head, a Christ in the Garden of Olives among them. Van Gogh told him to put the dreaming aside and look at something real, and said he had been out working in the olive groves himself. He painted this in December, outdoors at harvest time, three women reaching up into the branches. It is the first of three versions, the other two done afterwards in his room. Sending a crate of pictures to his brother in Paris the following April, he picked it out: you'll find that the olive trees with the pink sky are the best.