Olive Trees

On 3 January 1890 Van Gogh sent a batch of new canvases from the asylum at Saint-Rémy to his brother Theo in Paris, and this olive grove was among them. He had painted it outdoors in November, one of five olive orchards from that month. Look at the sky. It is made of small separate dabs, a stippling the Met's curators compare to Georges Seurat, the Paris painter who built pictures from dots, laid above the heavy curving strokes of the trees and the yellow ground. The canvas stayed with Theo's family until 1926. In 1937 the London collector Sir Victor Schuster acquired it partly in exchange for another Van Gogh, Women Picking Olives, and from July 1940 his collection was stored at the Tate for safekeeping. Both pictures have since come to the Met, the traded one in 1995 and this one in 1998.