Olive Picking

The story

Van Gogh painted this at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the last year of his life. He returned to the olive groves again and again — he thought they were as sacred to Provence as cypresses, and impossible to paint. Look at how the trunks writhe and the ground rolls. There is no single light source; the whole field seems lit from inside. He wrote to his brother Theo that painting the olive trees was "a very difficult motif," but that they were "so characteristic" he had to keep trying.