4.9/5
In the first days of April 1888, Vincent van Gogh sat down in Arles and tried to write to his brother Theo. It wasn't going well. "I'm in a fury of work as the trees are in blossom and I wanted to do a Provence orchard of tremendous gaiety," he told him, in a letter he could barely finish, having torn up the ones he wrote the day before.
That fury never really stopped. Van Gogh trees fill the last two and a half years of his life: apricot and peach trees in flower, the silver-green olive groves around the asylum at Saint-Rémy, plane trees over a village street, pines, cypresses, and finally a slope of tangled roots in Auvers. Trees also stand behind the Van Gogh paintings people know best, even the ones that look like they're about something else. The dark flame in the foreground of his night sky over Saint-Rémy is a cypress.
What follows goes place by place, because that's how he painted them. Each town gave him a different tree, and each tree pushed his brushwork somewhere new.
Arles, March and April 1888: the fruit trees
He arrived in the south in February 1888, expecting sun. What he got first was wind. By mid-March the skies were still often windy and cloudy, but the almond trees were starting to flower everywhere, and he noticed.
Within two weeks he was working in the orchards outside town. A clump of apricot trees in a little green orchard came first. Then a patch of dug-over ground, a wicker fence and two peach trees in full bloom, pink against a blue sky with white clouds. He described that one to his sister Willemien at the end of March, and added that he already had six paintings of blossoming fruit trees.
He didn't slow down. On 9 April he told Theo he needed about ten more of the same subject, and then, with some self-awareness, that this rage to paint orchards wouldn't last forever. After that, maybe bullrings. He also had a practical reason: orchards in blossom were subjects the brothers had a chance of selling or exchanging.
The small pear tree he painted that April, now in Amsterdam, shows what he took from Japanese prints. The tree sits low in the foreground, seen from above, its gnarled trunk and branches drawn hard against a pale background. Van Gogh collected Japanese prints, and this tall, narrow canvas borrows the composition as much as the subject.
The orchards were planned as a set. In mid-April he sketched three orchards side by side for Theo, the left one a pale pink orchard of apricot trees, and he imagined another group showing a very large orchard with a border of cypresses. Some of that stayed on paper. But the spring of 1888 is where his trees begin.
The olive groves of Saint-Rémy
A year later he was in a different state entirely. In May 1889 he checked himself into the Saint-Paul asylum at Saint-Rémy, and the olive groves were right there, a short walk outside the grounds. He'd seen them already from Arles. On 28 April 1889 he wrote Theo from Arles that "the murmur of an olive grove has something very intimate, immensely old about it," and compared it to the lopped willows of the Dutch meadows he grew up with. He also admitted the grove was almost too beautiful to dare paint.
He dared. Between June and December 1889 he made fifteen canvases of olive trees. The problem was color. The leaves wouldn't hold still: silver, sometimes bluer, sometimes greenish or bronzed, over ground that shifted from yellow to pink to purplish to a dull red ochre. His answer, visible in the November grove in Amsterdam, was swirling strokes in the foliage, bold outlines around the trunks and stylized blue shadows on the ground.
How many olive tree paintings did he make?
Fifteen canvases in the second half of 1889, plus smaller studies and versions he sent north. In late November he told Émile Bernard he had just finished five size 30 canvases of olive trees in one push, trying different effects: grey sky over yellow earth, then purple earth and foliage under a yellow sky, then red ochre ground under a pink and green sky.
That second combination is the one most people picture. The olive grove with a yellow sky and a sun disk has orange and yellow ground that points to autumn, and it hangs at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in gallery G355. The canvas is 29 by 36 1/2 inches.
Why the olive trees mattered to him
Gauguin and Bernard had just painted religious scenes out of their heads, one of them a Christ in the Garden of Olives. Van Gogh thought that was the wrong road. He wanted reality as the starting point, and he wrote Bernard: "My ambition is truly limited to a few clods of earth, some sprouting wheat. An olive grove." The olive series is that argument made in paint. Where they imagined a sacred garden, he went and stood in a real one.
Plane trees, pines and cypresses
Olives weren't the only trees at Saint-Rémy. In the autumn of 1889 he painted a village street where men were repairing the pavement under enormous plane trees, the trunks gigantic and the leaves turning yellow. The first version is in Cleveland, and he repeated the composition in a second canvas now at the Phillips Collection in Washington. His doctor allowed him to paint outside because working from nature eased his symptoms, and the road menders under the plane trees is one of the results. The Cleveland canvas measures 73.4 by 91.8 cm.
Inside the asylum walls there were pines. In October 1889 he described two views of the park where he tried to simplify and stress the proud, unchanging nature of the pines and cedar bushes against the blue.
And there were cypresses, which deserve their own article. Early in 1890 he told Theo that after the sunflowers he had been looking for something opposite and yet equal, and that the answer was the cypress. You can see it in the wheat field he painted in 1889 with dark cypresses rising on the right, a canvas of 73.2 by 93.4 cm now in New York.
A tree painted for a baby
Early in 1890 Theo and Jo had a son and named him Vincent Willem, after his uncle. Van Gogh's reply was a painting: large almond branches in flower against a blue sky, with the bold outlines and flat placement he had learned from Japanese printmaking. Almond trees flower early in spring, so they stand for new life.
He sent the almond branches he made for his nephew to Paris at the end of April 1890. It stayed with the family, and the boy it was painted for grew up to found the Van Gogh Museum. The canvas in Amsterdam is 73.3 by 92.4 cm.
Compare it with the Arles orchards two years earlier. Those were whole trees in whole fields. Here there's no ground, no horizon, only branches cut off by the frame, the way a Japanese printmaker would crop them.
Auvers, 1890: chestnuts, pear trees and roots
He moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, in May 1890. By 25 May he was planning studies of pink chestnut trees and white chestnut trees. In June he started working on long canvases, one meter wide and 50 centimeters high, which he cut himself from a roll. He made thirteen works in that format, and all but one are landscapes. In one of them, an evening view near the castle of Auvers, the pear trees are a flurry of black strokes against a yellow sky.
The last tree painting is also the strangest. Tree Roots, from July 1890, looks at first like a jumble of bright color and abstract shapes. Look longer and it becomes a slope of trunks and roots in a marl quarry. He never quite finished it, and it is probably his very last painting. The story of why it, and not the wheat field with crows, carries that label is told in our piece on the painting he left on the easel.
Why Van Gogh kept painting trees
Part of it was money. Orchards in blossom sold, or at least had a chance to, and the brothers were always short.
Part of it was Japan. The little pear tree and the almond branches both take their cropping and their outlines from the prints he collected.
But the bigger reason is the one he gave Bernard. He wanted to paint what was in front of him, and trees were always in front of him. They changed with the seasons, which suited a man who worked in series. They also gave him forms that could carry the brushwork he was developing: the twisting trunks of the olives, the upright flame of the cypress. When he was ill at Saint-Rémy, going out to paint them was part of the cure. If you want to follow the trees month by month in his own words, the letters worth reading first are a good place to start.
Trees are only one thread through his work, but they tie it together from Arles to Auvers. For a wider view of the canvases that made him famous alongside other masters, see the paintings everyone recognizes on sight.
An orchard on your own wall
Every tree painting above can be painted again by hand, in oil on canvas, one brushstroke at a time. The olive grove under a yellow sun and the almond branches are the two that work best in a bright space. You'll find them, along with the rest of Vincent's work our painters copy, at Art & See.
