Cypresses

Van Gogh painted his great Cypresses canvas in June 1889 at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, at the same time he was completing The Starry Night. He had written to Theo the previous month about the cypress as a subject that had been waiting for him: 'It is as beautiful as an Egyptian obelisk in line and proportion. And the green is of such a distinguished quality. It is a dark patch of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to hit off exactly.' The specific quality of the cypress — flame-like, rising against the violent sky, its dark green deepening to near-black — challenged him to find brushwork that could simultaneously convey the tree's upward thrust and its internal movement. The Metropolitan Museum version, with its swirling sky and densely worked trunks, is the most fully resolved of the cypress canvases and belongs alongside the contemporaneous Starry Night as a defining statement of his Saint-Rémy style.

The cypress trunks are built from short upward-curving strokes of near-black green, modulated with touches of yellow and grey. The sky swirls in broad undulating bands of blue and white. The impasto is exceptionally heavy, with ridges of paint projecting from the surface.