Trees

A small canvas, 33 by 41 centimetres, painted in 1888. Bernard spent about three months of that year on the Breton coast at Saint-Briac and went on to Pont-Aven in August, where his mother and his sister Madeleine joined him. The museum record names no location for this one, only the year. Its later life is better documented: for decades it was in Sweden, and in the winter of 1976 it was shown in Uppsala and then in Sala, at the town museum named after the Swedish painter Ivan Aguéli. Elin and Bengt Ekström of Uppsala handed their Bernard collection to the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh in December 1989, this study among it. In 2014 it travelled to Arles for an exhibition about what northern painters did with southern colour.