Mountains at Saint-Rémy

Mountains at Saint-Rémy, now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, was among the first landscapes Van Gogh painted after his arrival at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in May 1889 — an initial encounter with the Alpilles limestone ridges that would preoccupy him throughout his year in the institution. The mountains were entirely new to him: his entire painting life until Arles had been conducted in flat or gently undulating northern European landscapes, and the compressed, dramatic geology of Provence offered both a formal challenge and a psychological encounter with a scale of natural force beyond anything he had known. He wrote to Theo about the mountains with the excitement of a painter discovering an entirely new category of subject matter, struggling to find a brushwork language adequate to their particular quality. This early canvas, by comparison with the later, more agitated treatments, shows Van Gogh still discovering his approach to the subject — the brushwork not yet fully committed to the torsional energy of the mature Saint-Rémy style.

Van Gogh builds the mountain mass from swirling, interlocking strokes that give the rock an almost geological dynamism. The olive trees in the foreground are treated with even greater torsional energy, their twisted forms echoed in the turbulent mark-making throughout the rest of the composition.