Le Jardin de l'asile à Saint-Rémy

In May 1889 Van Gogh admitted himself to an asylum at Saint-Rémy, in the south of France, after the breakdown that had cost him part of his ear. For the first weeks he was not allowed beyond the walls, so the overgrown garden became his entire world, and he painted it again and again. He worked from an odd spot right against the building, letting a diagonal path and a stone bench pull the eye back through thickly loaded strokes of flowering bushes and trees. He told his friend the painter Emile Bernard that the mix of red ochre, of green dulled with grey, and black outlines carried something of the anxiety his fellow patients suffered. The paint stands up off the canvas in ridges you could almost feel.