Cypresses and Two Women

Dated to early 1890 and painted as Van Gogh was preparing to leave Saint-Rémy for Auvers-sur-Oise, this canvas of cypresses with two women represents an attempt to populate the turbulent asylum landscape with human figures that could anchor the scene's emotional charge. He had written to Theo about the cypresses as 'beautiful as Egyptian obelisks' — forms of permanent, vertical power — and had painted them obsessively during the summer and autumn of 1889 without human figures. The two small women, cloaked and walking, introduce a note of domestic normality that contrasts with the agitated natural forms surrounding them; they are perhaps an acknowledgement, as the asylum year drew to its close, that ordinary human life continued alongside his personal crisis. The composition also reflects his continuing engagement with the Millet tradition of figures within landscape, where the human presence gives the natural world a social and moral dimension. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The cypresses dominate the composition with their characteristic flame-like profiles, rendered in dark greens and blacks with writhing vertical strokes. The two small female figures at the base provide scale and a human anchor to what would otherwise be a purely elemental composition of trees, sky, and path.