Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Paul Hospital

Painted at Saint-Rémy in late 1889, this view of the rocky Alpilles mountains behind the asylum allowed Van Gogh to observe the dramatic geological formations he found in Provence. He described the mountains in letters as both beautiful and threatening, with their sharp ridges and compressed vegetation creating a landscape unlike anything in his native Netherlands. These rocky panoramas became a sustained subject during his Saint-Rémy confinement. This version is held at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, and was sent north as part of the shipments of work Van Gogh regularly sent to Theo.

The mountains are built with writhing, interconnected brushstrokes that give the stone a living, almost vegetative quality. Deep blues and grey-greens dominate the rocky masses, contrasted against the paler sky. The foreground vegetation is rendered in denser, more varied impasto — dense swirls of green and blue suggesting the wild growth of the asylum garden.