Landscape with Windblown Trees

Landscape with Windblown Trees (1885) belongs to Van Gogh's Dutch-period studies of the Brabant countryside under different weather conditions — specifically the effect of wind on the characteristic flat landscape of the Netherlands, where trees bent and fields moved with a visual drama the calm summer days did not offer. He was interested throughout his Dutch years in the weather as a painter's subject: rain, snow, dusk, storm, and wind each transformed the visible world in ways that demanded specific technical and chromatic responses. Windblown trees — their forms distorted by force, leaves stripped or pressed flat against the branches — anticipated the writhing, agitated vegetative forms of his Saint-Rémy period, where internal emotional energy replaced the external meteorological force as the agent of distortion. Current location unknown.

The trees' wind-shaped forms dominate the composition, their bent and combed branches rendered with Van Gogh's characteristic observational directness. The dark Dutch palette captures the drama of wind and weather without melodrama. The surrounding landscape is rendered more summarily, the trees themselves carrying the composition's energy.