Olive Grove

Olive Grove

This reproduction on canvas of Olive Grove by Vincent van Gogh is made in close cooperation with the Krӧller-Müller Museum, where the original painting is hanging in the Van Gogh Gallery. Vincent van Gogh painted at least 15 paintings of olive trees, mostly in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, where he stayed in an asylum. Here he painted the gardens of the asylum and, when he felt well enough and had permission to paint outside the grounds, he painted the nearby cypresses, wheat fields and olive trees. When Vincent was painting his Olive groves, his friends Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard had just made several religious paintings, which were created from their imaginations. Vincent disagreed with this way of working. He believed that reality should always be the starting point.

If there is one painting that gives an intense depiction of the sweltering heat, the arid land, the crooked, twisting trunks and branches and the atmosphere of an olive grove in Provence, it is this work by Vincent. He was fascinated by the ever-changing colour of the olive trees and tried to find a good way of painting their irregular growth. 'There are very beautiful fields of olive trees here, which are grey and silvery in leaf like pollard willows.

Then I never tire of the blue sky', he writes to his mother. In this nature study, Van Gogh uses long brushstrokes for the tree trunks, branches and contours. For the majority of the rest of the painting – the ground, the leaves of the olive trees and the sky – he works with short, curved brushstrokes. This makes the air appear to vibrate and the heat in the olive grove almost palpable. Without painting the sun itself, here he depicts the sun's energy and the power of nature.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Olive Grove 1889, Oil on canvas, 72.4x91.9cm, Collection Krӧller-Müller Museum.