03/10/2023
The daytime partner to Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.”
After voluntarily entering an asylum at Saint-Rémy in the south of France in the spring of 1889, wrote to his brother Theo: "I did a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky."
Van Gogh presented the earth as an undulating mass that rises and falls, ripples and whirls. A broad range of pigments are present in “The Olive Trees”—from the orange, ochre, and purple of the gnarled trunks to the blue, green, white, and yellow of the curled leaves. Like the brightly pigmented and boldly twisted olive trees, the hills, mountains, and clouds surrounding them seethe with color.
🌳 See this painting on view now in our fifth floor galleries.
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Vincent van Gogh. “The Olive Trees.” Saint Rémy, June-July 1889. Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest