Olive Trees

This June 1889 olive grove at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is among the earliest in Van Gogh's Saint-Rémy olive series — a relatively settled, naturalistic composition painted when the trees were still a fresh subject that he was approaching with direct observation rather than the expressive distortion of his later treatments. He had encountered olive groves in the asylum grounds immediately upon arrival, and their ancient, gnarled forms fascinated him both visually and historically: trees that had been growing in this landscape for centuries, cultivated by the same hands through the same seasonal rhythms. The Metropolitan holds this alongside Women Picking Olives from December of the same year, allowing visitors to compare the series' development over six months of sustained engagement with the same subject — from the relatively calm June trees to the more agitated, expressively distorted late-year canvases.

The relatively early date within the series is apparent in the more ordered, less agitated brushwork — foliage is rendered with shorter, more contained strokes than the swirling marks of the late-year canvases. The warm golden-ochre ground beneath the trees gives the painting a sunlit quality characteristic of the Provençal summer.