올리브 숲

Van Gogh painted his olive trees in the second half of 1889, in the months after he had checked himself into the asylum at Saint-Remy in Provence. From a spare room there he was allowed out to work in the fields nearby, and the silvery groves became one of his great subjects, more than a dozen canvases tracking them through the seasons and the changing light. He had recently tried and disliked painting religious scenes head-on, and the olive trees offered him a way around that. For centuries these were the trees of the garden where Christ prayed the night before his death, so the sacred was already in them without a single figure. Here the trunks twist and the ground heaves under short, driving strokes of green and orange.