Trees

Trees, painted in 1887 and held at the Van Gogh Museum, belongs to Van Gogh's sustained engagement with tree subjects across his entire career — from the dark Dutch poplars and elms of Nuenen through the blossoming orchards of Arles to the writhing cypresses of Saint-Rémy. This Paris-period study represents the transitional phase when his approach to trees was changing under Impressionist influence: the dark, monumental Dutch tree is giving way to something lighter and more atmospheric, the impasto beginning to fragment into smaller, more varied marks that respond to light rather than to weight. He had studied Dutch seventeenth-century tree drawings carefully — Ruisdael's oak studies, Rembrandt's etched trees — and his Paris period trees show the northern structural tradition being gradually dissolved by the lighter chromatic approach he was absorbing from the Impressionists. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Tree trunks are rendered in dark sienna and umber with relatively conventional tonal modelling. The foliage or bare branches are treated with shorter, lighter strokes that begin to fragment the form. A lighter, cooler palette distinguishes these works from the Nuenen tree subjects.