Trees and Undergrowth

The subject already had a name when Van Gogh took it up in the summer of 1887. French painters called it sous-bois, the view of a wood from inside it, made popular by the Barbizon painters a generation earlier and kept going by the Impressionists. It means giving up most of what a landscape usually offers, the horizon, the weather, the distance. What is left is trunks, the grass between them, and the light coming down through the leaves in short strokes of white and yellow.

He painted this one in Paris and left it in Theo's apartment in the second half of July. The motif stayed with him for the rest of his working life. Three years later at Auvers he was still painting undergrowth, on canvases far wider than this one.