View of the Alpilles

From May 1889 Van Gogh's world was mostly one walled wheatfield beside the hospital at Saint-Rémy in Provence, the field he could see from his bedroom window. Behind it stands the Alpilles, a low limestone ridge with its rock faces stripped bare. He carried this small canvas, about 37 by 30 centimetres, out into the enclosed field and set the flowering trees of the spring against that stone. He wrote home that he could easily make a whole series of these Alpilles, since he had been looking at them long enough by then to grow used to them. When he wrote it he had a few weeks of Provence left; he took the train north in May 1890.