Donne che raccolgono olive

Van Gogh painted olive groves at least 15 times in 1889, from the asylum at Saint-Rémy in Provence, and there was an argument behind it. That autumn Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard, two painters he knew well, sent him photographs of their own pictures of Christ in the Garden of Olives, invented out of their heads. He thought that was the wrong way round and said so in his letters. He would reach the same feeling by going out to the actual trees. He made three canvases of these olive pickers in December. This is the last and the most stylised of the three, the one he meant for his mother and sister back in the Netherlands, with the whole sky laid in rows of pale pink.