Olive Trees on a Hillside

Late in 1889 Van Gogh was a voluntary patient at the asylum in Saint-Remy, allowed out with his easel on the days he was well enough. That autumn his young friend the painter Emile Bernard sent him photographs of new canvases, among them a Christ in the Garden of Olives worked up from imagination. Van Gogh had tried that subject twice in Arles the year before and destroyed both attempts, and his answer now was to walk out to the actual olive groves.

He wrote to Theo that what he was making would look hard and coarse next to their abstractions, and that it would smell of the earth. That is more or less what is here, the gnarled trunks and the slope they stand on, worked in short curving strokes.

He painted around 15 olive canvases that year, and by December he had added the women who came to pick the fruit.