Two Diggers among Trees

Two Diggers Among Trees at the Detroit Institute of Arts was painted at Saint-Rémy in 1889, when Van Gogh was developing a group of works combining agricultural labor with the specific landscape of the asylum and its surroundings. Figures digging beneath established trees — the repetitive labor of turning soil in the shadow of organic forms that dwarf human scale — connected his ongoing interest in Millet's vision of peasant labor to the specific visual material available to him at Saint-Rémy. He was working partly from Millet prints and partly from direct observation of laborers working in the asylum grounds and surrounding fields. The Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the major American encyclopedic museums, holds this as part of its significant collection of European and American painting. Detroit's collecting history — shaped by the automotive industry's wealth and the city's complex cultural legacy — produced a museum with genuine strengths in both European modernism and American art, and this Van Gogh is among the institution's most important Post-Impressionist holdings. The combination of human figures and surrounding trees presents one of Van Gogh's characteristic compositional challenges: making both the figures and the natural environment equally present, neither subordinate to the other.

The two figures are placed within a setting of trees, the relationship between the human figures and the established vegetation carefully observed. Van Gogh's Saint-Rémy technique animates the trees' trunks and branches with characteristic swirling strokes while the figures are rendered with more direct, controlled observation. His palette uses the warm ochres of turned earth against the greens and blues of the surrounding trees and sky.