Art Stories: A Visual Journey Through Van Gogh’s Olive Trees
He had wandered all his life, from the Netherlands to Belgium to Paris, before settling in the south of France in February 1888. Van Gogh came in search of sun, new light to drive his interest in color, and to establish a community of artists. He invited the painter Paul Gauguin to join this “Studio of the South.” Just two months after Gauguin’s arrival, Van Gogh suffered a breakdown. He sliced off part of his own ear, and a terrified Gauguin promptly left, never to return. By May 1889, little more than a year after arriving in the south, Van Gogh had checked himself into the psychiatric hospital Saint-Rémy, where he spent months studying and painting the nearby olive groves.
Take a Closer Look
The Sun Appears
Van Gogh filled 15 canvases with olive groves between June and December of 1889. This is the only one that features the sun.
Room with a View
Initially confined to the asylum grounds, Van Gogh painted the hallways and a walled garden that he could see from his room. When he was finally free to wander, he painted the surrounding countryside, especially its olive groves, cypresses, and wheat fields.
Debt to Delacroix
The older French painter Eugene Delacroix’s art profoundly influenced Van Gogh. In fact, Van Gogh’s use of muted halftones (between the brightest and darkest value of that color) and his characteristically brushy, hatching technique were inspired by Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment, which Van Gogh had recently seen.
Eugène Delacroix, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1834. Courtesy of the Louvre Museum, Paris.
Olives in Autumn
Van Gogh painted the olive groves throughout his stay at the psychiatric hospital. The colors he used varied depending on the season, the light of day, and his mood. In November, when he created this painting, Van Gogh wrote, “… at present I am working in the olive trees, seeking the different effects of a grey sky against yellow earth, with dark green notes of the foliage, another time the earth and foliage all purplish against a yellow sky, then red ochre earth and pink and green sky.”
Nature and Spirituality
Why did Van Gogh paint so many olive trees? Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and fellow painter Emile Bernard talked of creating art that consoles using imagery of “a purer and more serene nature,” instead of religious imagery. He wanted to show it was possible to paint the meaning of Christ in the Garden of Olives, the garden of Gethsemane where Christ prayed the night before his crucifixion, “without aiming straight for the historical Garden of Gethsemane.”
Gauguin sent Van Gogh a letter in early November 1889 with a sketch of his just-completed painting, Christ in the Garden of Olives. He had given the figure of Christ his own facial features and Van Gogh’s hair coloration. The palette is vividly unnatural, and Gauguin acknowledged that the canvas “isn’t destined to be understood.”
Van Gogh distrusted modern religious painting as much as he distrusted modern religious institutions. “I’m not an admirer of Gauguin’s Christ in the Garden of Olives,” he wrote. “If I remain here, I wouldn’t try to paint a Christ in the Garden of Olives, but in fact the olive picking as it is still seen today, and then giving the correct proportions of the human figure in it.” Painting the olive trees was the closest he came to painting religious imagery in the final years of his life.
Paul Gauguin, Christ in the Garden of Olives, 1889. Courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art
Gauguin sent Van Gogh a letter in early November 1889 with a sketch of his just-completed painting, Christ in the Garden of Olives. He had given the figure of Christ his own facial features and Van Gogh’s hair coloration. The palette is vividly unnatural, and Gauguin acknowledged that the canvas “isn’t destined to be understood.”
Van Gogh distrusted modern religious painting as much as he distrusted modern religious institutions. “I’m not an admirer of Gauguin’s Christ in the Garden of Olives,” he wrote. “If I remain here, I wouldn’t try to paint a Christ in the Garden of Olives, but in fact the olive picking as it is still seen today, and then giving the correct proportions of the human figure in it.” Painting the olive trees was the closest he came to painting religious imagery in the final years of his life.
Paul Gauguin, Christ in the Garden of Olives, 1889. Courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art