Vista del asilo y de la capilla de Saint-Rémy

In the autumn of 1889 Van Gogh was a voluntary patient at the Saint-Paul asylum, in an old monastery at Saint-Rémy in the south of France. He had checked himself in that spring, after the breakdown in Arles, and he was allowed to paint. In roughly a year there he made about 150 canvases, the cypresses, the wheatfields, the starry night among them, almost all of them looking outward, away from the walls. This is the one exception: the institution itself, seen from the hillside, its chapel and thin spire rising over the trees. The sky is worked in his short, driving strokes. He left Saint-Rémy the following spring and died a few months after that, at 37.