The Olive Trees

Van Gogh painted this in the summer of 1889, a few months after he checked himself into the asylum at Saint-Remy in the south of France. He was allowed out with an attendant to work in the surrounding fields, and the silvery olive groves and the low Alpilles mountains behind them became one of his main subjects that year. In his letters he set this daylight landscape directly beside The Starry Night, painted in the same weeks, as its partner under the sun. Nothing here is still. The ground heaves in long combed strokes, the trees twist, and a thick pale cloud rolls across the sky. He made at least 15 olive-tree paintings around this time, trying to catch them in different light and weather.