L'ospedale Saint-Paul a Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

On the 8th of May 1889 Vincent van Gogh committed himself to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, in the old town of Saint-Rémy in Provence. He was given a room, and beyond it a walled garden gone wild, with tall pines rising over rough grass and periwinkle. This is that garden. He described it in a letter to a fellow painter, Émile Bernard: the red-ochre earth burnt by the sun, the pine trunks the same colour, the dark foliage almost black against an evening sky. Confined as he was, the ground just outside his door became his main subject, and the year he spent shut in here turned out to be one of the most productive of his whole life.