圣保罗医院的花园

Van Gogh painted this in the autumn of 1889 from inside the walls of the Saint-Paul asylum at Saint-Remy, in Provence, where he had admitted himself that May after the breakdown in Arles. The garden was most of the world he had left. In a letter to his friend the painter Emile Bernard he described this very corner, the tall pines with red-ochre trunks against an evening sky, the ground burnt by the sun and littered with fallen needles. He wrote that the heavy, dark green of the foliage carried the feeling of anxiety that some of his fellow patients suffered from. He was allowed out to paint under supervision, and worked at a furious pace. In the year he spent here he made roughly 150 paintings.