The Garden of Saint Paul's Hospital ('Leaf-Fall')

By the autumn of 1889 the garden of the Saint-Paul hospital at Saint-Rémy was the subject Van Gogh had most of, and the season was doing something to it that he wanted. He called a picture like this a leaf-fall. The autumn is carried by the colours, by leaves going sideways in the wind and by a single figure walking among the trunks. He set the viewpoint high, so the pine trunks are cut off by the top and the bottom edge of the canvas, a way of cropping he had taken from the Japanese prints he collected in Paris and still thought about in Provence. The canvas is a little over 70 centimetres tall. Around the beginning of December he sent it north to Theo in Paris with the rest of the garden work.