As Oliveiras (The Olive Trees / Olive Trees in a Mountainous Landscape) - Vincent van Gogh

As Oliveiras (The Olive Trees / Olive Trees in a Mountainous Landscape) - Vincent van Gogh
MoMA Museu de Arte Moderna de Nova York Estados Unidos
OST - 73x92 - 1889

Vincent van Gogh painted at least 15 paintings of olive trees, mostly in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889. At his own request, he lived at an asylum there from May 1889 through May 1890 painting the gardens of the asylum and, when he had permission to venture outside its walls, nearby olive trees, cypresses and wheat fields.

One painting, Olive Trees in a Mountainous Landscape, was a complement to The Starry Night.

The olive tree paintings had special significance for van Gogh. A group in May 1889 represented life, the divine and the cycle of life while those from November 1889 arose out of his attempt to symbolize his feelings about Christ in Gethsemane. His paintings of olive pickers demonstrate the relationship between man and nature by depicting one of the cycles of life, harvesting or death. It is also an example of how individuals, through interaction with nature, can connect with the divine.

Van Gogh found respite and relief in interaction with nature. When the series of olive tree paintings was made in 1889 he was subject to illness and emotional turmoil, yet the paintings are considered to be among his finest works.

In May 1889, Van Gogh voluntarily entered the asylum of St. Paul near Saint-Rémy in Provence. There he had access to an adjacent cell he used as his studio. He was initially confined to the immediate asylum grounds and painted (without the window bars) the world he saw from his room, such as ivy covered trees, lilacs, and irises in the garden. As he ventured outside of the asylum walls, he painted the wheat fields, olive groves, and cypress trees in the surrounding countryside, which he saw as "characteristic of Provence." Over the course of the year, he painted about 150 canvases.

The imposed regimen of asylum life gave van Gogh a hard-won stability: "I feel happier here with my work than I could be outside. By staying here a good long time, I shall have learned regular habits and in the long run the result will be more order in my life." While his time at Saint-Rémy forced him to manage his vices, such as coffee, alcohol, poor eating habits and periodic attempts to consume turpentine and paint, his stay was not ideal. He needed to obtain permission to leave the asylum grounds. The food was poor; he generally ate only bread and soup. His only apparent form of treatment were two-hour baths twice a week. During his year there, van Gogh had periodic attacks, possibly due to a form of epilepsy. By early 1890, when the attacks worsened, he concluded that his stay at the asylum was not helping him to recover, which led him to move to Auvers-sur-Oise just north of Paris in May 1890.

Painting the countryside, the surrounding fields, cypress trees and olive trees restored van Gogh's connection to nature through art. He completed at least 15 paintings in 1889 of "venerable, gnarled olive trees," pervasive throughout southern France, of which he wrote:

“The effect of daylight and the sky means there are endless subjects to be found in olive trees. For myself I look for the contrasting effects in the foliage, which changes with the tones of the sky. At times, when the tree bares its pale blossoms and big blue flies, emerald fruit beetles and cicadas in great numbers fly about, everything is immersed in pure blue. Then, as the bronzer foliage takes on more mature tones, the sky is radiant and streaked with green and orange, and then again, further into autumn, the leaves take on violet tones something of the color of a ripe fig, and this violet effect manifests itself most fully with the contrast of the large, whitening sun within its pale halo of light lemon. Sometimes, too, after a shower I've seen the whole sky pink and orange, which gave an exquisite value and coloring to the silvery gray-greens. And among all this were women, also pink, who were gathering the fruit.”

He found olive trees, representative of Provence, both "demanding and compelling." He wrote to his brother Theo that he was "struggling to catch (the olive trees). They are old silver, sometimes with more blue in them, sometimes greenish, bronzed, fading white above a soil which is yellow, pink, violet tinted orange... very difficult." He found that the "rustle of the olive grove has something very secret in it, and immensely old. It is too beautiful for us to dare to paint it or to be able to imagine it."

As a young man, van Gogh considered pursuing ministry to serve working people. He studied for a time in the Netherlands but his zeal and self-imposed asceticism cost him a short-term position in lay ministry. He became somewhat embittered and rejected the church establishment, yet found a personal spirituality that was comforting and important to him. By 1879, he made a shift in the direction of his life and found he could express his "love of God and man" through painting.

Van Gogh painted nature, the major subject for his works in the last 29 months of his life, to bring relief from his illnesses and emotional distress. Prior to this period he had rejected what he perceived as the narrow religion of his parents, and took an almost nihilistic stance, not unlike Nietzsche's, toward religion and God. It was among the blossoming trees, the olive orchards and fields that van Gogh most often found "profound meaning", because he saw in their cycles an analogy to human life. He wrote to Theo that death, happiness and unhappiness are "necessary and useful" and relative, declaring "Even faced with an illness that breaks me up and frightens me, that belief is unshaken."

The autumn work was somewhat in reaction to the recent compositions of Christ in the Garden of Olives by his friends Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. Frustrated by their work which he qualified with the words "nothing was observed", Van Gogh painted "in the groves, morning and evening during these clear, cold days, but in beautiful, bright sunshine" resulting in five canvases above the three he completed earlier in the year. He wrote to his brother, Theo, "What I have done is a rather hard and coarse reality beside their abstractions, but it will have a rustic quality and will smell of the earth." Rather than attempting to recreate what the scene might have been like, he explained "one can express anguish without making reference to the actual Gethsemane, and... there is no need to portray figures from the Sermon on the Mount in order to express a gentle and comforting feeling." He also commented: "I shall not paint a Christ in the Garden of Olives, but shall paint the olive harvest as one might see it today, and by giving the human figure its proper place in it, one might perhaps be reminded of it."

In the blazing heat of this Mediterranean afternoon, nothing rests. Against a ground scored as if by some invisible torrent, intense green olive trees twist and crimp, capped by the rolling, dwindling hillocks of the distant Alps, beneath a light-washed sky with a bundled, ectoplasmic cloud.

After van Gogh voluntarily entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy in the south of France in the spring of 1889, he wrote his brother Theo: "I did a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky." Later, when the pictures had dried, he sent both of them to Theo in Paris, noting: "The olive trees with the white cloud and the mountains behind, as well as the rise of the moon and the night effect, are exaggerations from the point of view of the general arrangement; the outlines are accentuated as in some old woodcuts."

Van Gogh's letters make it clear that he created this particular intense vista of the southern French landscape as a daylight partner to the visionary nocturne of his more famous canvas, The Starry Night. He felt that both pictures showed, in complementary ways, the principles he shared with his fellow painter Paul Gauguin, regarding the freedom of the artist to go beyond "the photographic and silly perfection of some painters" and intensify the experience of color and linear rhythms.