Two Poplars in the Alpilles near Saint-Rémy

Van Gogh painted the two poplars in the Alpilles foothills during the autumn of 1889, when he was permitted increasingly frequent excursions beyond the asylum walls to paint the surrounding landscape. The poplars — their characteristic tall, columnar form, their autumn yellow against the pale Alpilles stone — provided the kind of compositional subject he had been developing since his Paris period: vertical tree forms against horizontal or receding landscape, a structure he associated with the Japanese print aesthetic he admired. He was working at this period with extraordinary confidence and speed, the Saint-Rémy technique having become fully his own: swirling energetic strokes that give every surface the quality of animated matter. The Cleveland Museum of Art, which holds a distinguished collection of European and American art, acquired this as part of its sustained Post-Impressionist holdings. The two poplars have the asymmetric, Japanese-influenced composition Van Gogh was exploring throughout the Saint-Rémy period — the trees placed off-center against the expansive sky, their autumn color catching the October light. He wrote to Theo in October 1889 about the specific quality of the Alpilles landscape in autumn, when the trees changed color and the mountain limestone looked different in the lower angle of the sun.

The two poplars are rendered in rapid vertical strokes of dark green and yellow-green, their forms tapering against a pale sky of blue-white. The Alpilles in the background are painted in thin, layered strokes of grey-violet. The foreground scrub is built from short, directional marks that create a vigorous ground plane.