Trees in the Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital

Van Gogh painted this in the walled garden of the asylum at Saint-Remy, in the south of France, where he had checked himself in during the spring of 1889, some months after cutting off part of his ear. For a year that garden was most of his world. When he was well he was allowed out among its pines and flowerbeds, and when he was not he worked from his window or from memory. So he painted these same trees again and again through the seasons. Here he crowds in close on the trunks, following the twist and lean of the pines with thick, ropey strokes of paint. He wrote to his brother Theo almost daily from this place, describing the very motifs he had in front of him. The ground is worked as hard as the trees, the earth churned into the same restless lines.