Tree Trunks with Ivy

This one has no horizon and almost no sky. Painted in July 1889, it looks straight down into the tangle of an overgrown garden, the sort of dense undergrowth the French call a sous-bois, all tree trunks, grass and ivy. Van Gogh made it in the neglected grounds of the asylum where he was staying near Saint-Rémy, a garden left to run wild, and he seems to have liked exactly that airless green closeness. The paint is thick and worked wet into wet, in short curling strokes that pile up into a rhythm across the whole canvas. There is no path in and no way through, only ivy climbing the trunks and light caught here and there in the grass.