Study with spruce in the fall

By November 1889 Vincent van Gogh had been living six months inside the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, just outside Saint-Rémy in Provence. An attack that July had kept him indoors for weeks, and he did not work outside again until October. The motif within reach was the garden inside the walls, left neglected, planted with tall pines standing in rough grass, and he came back to it through the autumn. Here he takes a high viewpoint and gives most of the canvas to the crowns, crooked branches dark against a pale sky, a trunk cropped by the edge on either side. It is a small canvas, 46 by 51 centimetres. Further back, past the trunks, you can make out the wall that closed the garden in and one figure out walking.