Huerto de olivos

Van Gogh committed himself to the asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1889, and for the first weeks he was not allowed past the walls. He painted the garden, the corridor, the view through the barred window of his room. In the first week of June the doctors let him out into the countryside, and the olive groves were what he went for, with fresh canvas and paint Theo had just sent from Paris. He came back to those trees through the rest of the year, in at least 15 pictures, as the leaves went from silver to bronze. This canvas is one of the earliest of them, begun in June and worked on again in September, and it left for Theo in Paris in a crate of paintings that autumn.