Trees in the Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital

Van Gogh painted these trees in 1889, from inside the walls of the asylum at Saint-Remy, where he had committed himself that spring after the breakdown in Arles. For a year the hospital garden was much of the world he could reach, and he worked it again and again, the same pines and paths in shifting weather and light. Between attacks he was steady and remarkably prolific, and the summer of this garden was also the summer he painted the Starry Night. He left Saint-Remy the following May and was dead by that July.