"Les Alpilles", mountain-landscape at Saint-Rémy

Painted at Saint-Rémy in 1889, this view of the rugged Alpilles mountain range captures the wild limestone terrain that Van Gogh could see from the asylum and paint during supervised walks. 'Les Alpilles' became one of his most important landscape motifs of the Saint-Rémy period — ancient, weathered peaks that appealed to his sense of geological drama and provided a subject very different from the cultivated landscapes of his Dutch and Paris years. This canvas is among the most purely geological of his paintings, treating the mountain as a study in mass, texture, and resistant natural form.

The rocky crags of the Alpilles fill the canvas with turbulent energy, rendered in Van Gogh's swirling, muscular brushwork. Olive trees and scrub in the foreground are built up in dense, animated strokes. The palette is restricted — blues, greens, and pale stone colors — giving the scene a raw, untamed character.