Trees on a slope

Trees on a Slope, now at the Rijksmuseum alongside the 1888 Wheat Field, was painted during Van Gogh's Paris years when he was exploring the hills and slopes of Montmartre and the surrounding suburban landscape for subjects. The slope as a compositional element was unusual for him — his preferred landscape subjects in both Holland and Provence tended toward the flat or gently undulating — and the trees growing on an incline, their trunks angled by the gradient, offered a different kind of structural challenge from upright growth. The Rijksmuseum holds both Paris period and later work in its Van Gogh collection, preserving evidence of both his formative French years and his mature southern production. Van Gogh was in 1887 actively experimenting with different compositional approaches, influenced by his study of Japanese prints — with their unconventional angles and asymmetric compositions — and by his observation of how European artists from Seurat to Pissarro were finding new ways to organize the picture plane. The trees on a slope have the exploratory quality of this period: the subject is not yet fully aligned with his deepest interests (agricultural labor, the southern landscape, human figure studies), but it is approached with the same sustained attention he brought to everything.

The slope gives the trees an angled, dynamic quality different from upright growth, their trunks leaning slightly with the incline. Van Gogh's Paris period palette and brushwork are visible — lighter and more varied than Nuenen, the foliage rendered with Impressionist broken color. The slope itself provides an unusual ground plane within the composition.