Paysage avec un couple marchant sous un croissant de lune

Van Gogh painted this in May 1890, during his last weeks at the asylum of Saint-Rémy in Provence, where he had admitted himself the year before. Soon after he left for the town of Auvers near Paris, and by late July he was dead, at 37. Knowing that, it is easy to over-read a small picture like this, so it helps to say plainly what it holds. A couple walks a country road at dusk under a thin crescent moon, among olive trees that twist and flow the way they do across all his late Provence work. The evening sky is an odd, deliberate green sliding toward orange. The two figures are barely taller than the grass they pass through.