Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Paul Hospital

The Alpilles limestone ridges visible from the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum offered Van Gogh a kind of landscape completely absent from his northern European experience, and he engaged them with sustained fascination throughout his year there. These mountains behind the hospital represent his mid-period treatment of the same geological forms he would address with increasing torsional energy through the summer and autumn of 1889. He described the Alpilles to Theo as both beautiful and oppressive — their sharp crests and compressed vegetation unlike the soft, flat Netherlands that had shaped his visual formation. The Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, which holds this canvas, acquired it as part of the broader Scandinavian collecting enthusiasm for Van Gogh that began in the late nineteenth century: Theo had sold several canvases to Danish and Norwegian collectors, and Nordic artists including Christian Krogh were among the first to recognize Van Gogh's significance. These northern holdings form an important part of the dispersed Van Gogh canon.

The mountains are built with writhing, interconnected brushstrokes that give the stone a living, almost vegetative quality. Deep blues and grey-greens dominate the rocky masses, contrasted against the paler sky. The foreground vegetation is rendered in denser, more varied impasto — dense swirls of green and blue suggesting the wild growth of the asylum garden.