Cobertizos de madera

Van Gogh painted this in the autumn of 1889, during the year he spent as a voluntary patient at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, just outside Saint-Remy in Provence. He had checked himself in that May, after the breakdown in Arles that cost him part of his ear, and the doctors let him paint the grounds and the countryside around the walls between his attacks. Olive groves and cypresses became his subjects that year, the same months that gave him The Starry Night. Here a cluster of wooden huts sits among the trees, humble farm buildings under the restless, combed brushwork he had grown into in the south. He worked fast when he was well, knowing the calm might not last. The following spring he left the asylum, and by that summer he was dead.