Ciprestes

Van Gogh painted this in June 1889, during his year as a voluntary patient at the asylum of Saint-Paul in Saint-Remy, in the south of France. That summer he was finally allowed out beyond the walls, with a guardian, into the countryside, and the cypresses caught him at once. He wrote to his brother Theo that they were on his mind constantly, the way the sunflowers had been, and that nobody had really painted them as he saw them. Here one rises like a dark green flame against a sky he described in another letter as swirling. The tall trees were traditionally planted in Provence beside graves, which may be part of why they held him. He had less than a year to live when he painted them.