Pine Trees against a Red Sky with Setting Sun

Van Gogh painted this in November 1889, while he was living inside an asylum at Saint-Rémy in Provence, where he had checked himself in that spring. Even in winter he kept going outside to work, often against the mistral, the hard cold wind that scours that part of France. He wrote to his sister Wil that he wanted tall, ravaged pines standing against a red evening sky. You can see them bent and battered, holding their ground as the light drops behind them. He later brushed some green into the sky, saying that from a distance it broke up and softened the other tones. It was one of many canvases he sent north to his brother Theo that winter.