Van Gogh's Olive Trees
During his year at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted the olive groves around the asylum in more than a dozen canvases.
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About the series
Vincent van Gogh painted more than a dozen views of olive groves while he was a patient at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Most date from June to December 1889, when he was allowed to work in the countryside outside the walls.
The twisted trunks and silver-green leaves are drawn with rhythmic, curving strokes, and the ground and sky move in the same way. Some canvases show the groves in bright midday light, others under pink or yellow evening skies, and several late ones include women picking olives. He sometimes painted the same grove several times in different colour schemes, and he wrote to his brother Theo about how hard it was to capture the changing silver of the leaves. Versions hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, among others.
The canvases are wide landscapes of a similar format, so two or three from the series can hang in a row.
