The Olive Orchard

Van Gogh painted this in 1889, the year he spent as a voluntary patient at the asylum in Saint-Remy, in the south of France. The olive trees around the grounds became something close to an obsession; he made about 15 canvases of them. He told his brother Theo how hard they were to pin down. Old silver, he wrote, sometimes bluish, sometimes bronzed, against soil that ran yellow, pink and violet. Here three women work along a ladder, gathering the fruit, and the whole field seems to move: trees, ground and sky all built from the same long curling strokes. This was ordinary local labour, the olive harvest going on just beyond the asylum walls.