The white cottage among the olive trees

In the autumn of 1889, shut in the asylum at Saint-Remy in Provence, Van Gogh painted the olive groves on the slopes around him more than a dozen times. He had reasons beyond the scenery. His friends Bernard and Gauguin had been making religious pictures from imagination, Christs in gardens they had never seen, and it irritated him. He wanted the holy feeling caught in something real, in actual olive trees with their twisting trunks and silver leaves, worked in front of the motif. This canvas sets a small white house among them, the ground and foliage full of restless short strokes, the light clear. He linked the olive to grief and consolation, the tree of the Garden of Gethsemane, while keeping the Gospel scene itself out of the frame.