Van Gogh’s Olive Trees
Frances Fowle
Vincent van Gogh is one of the most mythologised figures in art history. The Dutch Post-Impressionist is usually recalled as a madman, with his bandaged ear, painting in a tortured frenzy.
Art historian and Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery, Francis Fowle considers the brilliant and varied artist behind the myth. Van Gogh’s many depictions of olive trees demonstrate the surprisingly studious approach which went into his expressive brushwork, and his thoughtful interest in Impressionist colour theory. Spiritually charged but diligently sketched from life, Fowle sees Van Gogh’s olive grove paintings as a ‘pure vision of the landscape’.
Van Gogh painted a whole series of Olive Trees in 1889, and this painting in the Scottish National Gallery is one of my absolute favourites. It’s a really pure vision of the landscape and it’s full of energy, and his real passion for his subject. People tend to, I think, read into the painting Van Gogh’s mental state at the time. For example, in 1910, he was described by the critics as ‘a madman’. And this myth evolved of Van Gogh as the madman, which almost, in a way, is responsible for us remembering and celebrating him. But he generally would paint only during a moment of calm. Even though when you look at the painting, it looks like he’s suffering from tremendous anguish, he probably wasn’t at the time. He was probably actually relishing the country, and just looking at the olive groves.
It looks on the surface as if it’s been painted very quickly and in a rather slap-dash manner because he’s got the paint squeezed directly from the tube in places, but it’s actually quite carefully worked out. It’s got this real sense of rhythm, and there’s much more to it as you look into it. Another thing I think is really fascinating is this wonderful, really gnarled shape of the trees themselves. They’re very convoluted shapes and then that works up into the movement of the leaves. You can see the same kind of movement in paintings like Starry Night when you get the sense of the sky, which is very turbulent. But it is quite rhythmic as well.
Van Gogh took quite a long time to develop into an artist. His first career was as an art dealer, and he worked in the Hague for his uncle’s business. He decided he was going to join the church, train to be a minister, taking after his father. And he went and worked as a lay preacher in the Borinage which is an area in Belgium, for a period. Working amongst very poor people, miners, people who are very much working class. And those were the people that he really responded to throughout his life. He always was a bit of an outsider.
He then moved to Paris, and he encountered Impressionism for the first time. Immediately his palette lightened. And then he met the artist Emile Bernard, who had quite an influence on him along with Paul Gauguin. He was also looking at the work of George Seurat, the Pointillist. They were responsible largely for the changes that take place in his work at this time. He paints with these broad strokes, very stabbing brushstrokes and you get this sense of incredible energy. You can see that in the Olive Trees. This was the period after he’d had this terrible crisis when Gauguin was staying with him in Arles and he chopped his ear off.
He then admitted himself to the asylum in Saint-Rémy and was there for nearly a year. He had a view of olive groves from his window. So that became his favourite subject. In November 1889, Van Gogh wrote to his friend Emile Bernard;
[Van Gogh’s letter] So at present, I’m working in present I’m working in the olive groves, seeking the effects of the grey sky against yellow earth, with dark green note of the foliage. Then red ochre earth, and pink and green sky. If I haven’t written for a long time, it’s because having to struggle against my illness and to calm my head, I hardly felt like having discussions and found danger in these abstractions.
The thing that really makes the impact is the fact that the landscape is slipping away, it slips down to the right. You feel like you’re almost losing control. One of the most striking things, I think, is the different layers of the paint. You’ve got these very thick impasto areas where the paint stands up on the surface. So he’s quite experimental in his approach. He’s worked the top of the painting a great deal, so this part’s much more spontaneous. And then you can see this very thick layering up at the top where he’s trying to work out the relationship between the trees and the sky in the background. He talks a lot on the letters about the different contrasting colours between the wonderful silvery olive grey of the trees themselves, and then the colour of the sky.
When we look at the Van Gogh Olive Trees, there are associations that Van Gogh makes with the painting of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, but he was not happy to paint a fictitious painting. So, for example, Gauguin had painted Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and used his own self-portrait as Christ. But Van Gogh was not happy to do that, he wanted to paint what he saw. So he paints here the olive trees as he sees them. But at the same time, he’s trying to express that sense of, perhaps, religious fervour. I think there is quite a profound spiritual element to a lot of his work, but he was very conflicted and especially, you see this developing towards the end of his life. Paintings like The Sower. This idea of the cycle of the seasons, he was very interested in the natural cycle of life.
Van Gogh is popular today, firstly because he’s a great artist, but secondly because we know so much about him, and so everyone knows about the story about the ear. We know him perhaps more often through the reproduction placemat, than we do through actually looking at the paintings. And in some ways, that’s a problem because people have got this very stereotypical view of what represents Van Gogh, of what a Van Gogh painting is. But in fact, he was an incredibly diverse and varied and brilliant artist.
With thanks to
National Galleries of Scotland
Archive
Alamy Stock Photo
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles
Kimbell Art Museum
Kröller-Müller Museum
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis
Musée d’Orsay
Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Scotland
Norton Museum of Art
Pond5
RNK Innovations
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
Stavros Niarcos
The Courtauld
The Morgan Library & Museum
The National Gallery, London
The Umbrella Shoppe
United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Music
Audio Network
Original composition
Full list of images shown:
Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat
Vincent van Gogh, 1887
Van Gogh Museum
The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Self-Portrait
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Musée d’Orsay
© Musée d’Orsay, dist.RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
Self-Portrait as a Painter
Vincent van Gogh, 1887 – 1888
Van Gogh Museum
The Potato Eaters
Vincent van Gogh, 1885
Van Gogh Museum
Bird’s eye view of Paris, France
Anonymous photographer, c. 1890s
Panorama of the Seven Bridges, Paris, France
Anonymous photographer, c. 1890 – 1919
United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs
Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois Paris
Claude Monet, 1867
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
© b p k – Photo Agency / Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders
Paris study: View from Theo’s Apartment
Vincent van Gogh, 1887
Van Gogh Museum
Portrait of Emile Bernard
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1886
© The National Gallery, London
Self-Portrait
Paul Gaugin, 1885
Kimbell Art Museum
Seine at La Grande Jatte
Georges Seurat, 1888
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
The Courtauld
© The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London
Van Gogh Asylum St. Remy de-Provence France
Brian Jannsen, 2009
Alamy Stock Photo
Hospital in Saint Remy
Vincent Van Gogh, 1889
Musée d’Orsay
Olive Orchard
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Kröller-Müller Museum
Letter from Vincent van Gogh writing from Saint Remy to Emile Bernard, c. 1889 Nov. 26., letter 26 [1v2] Sketches after E. Bernard, Madeleine in the Bois d’Amour and Red poplars.
Thaw Collection
The Morgan Library & Museum: MA 6441.19
Women Picking Olives
Vincent Van Gogh, 1889
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)
The Olive Trees
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)
Christ in the Garden of Olives
Paul Gauguin, 1889
Norton Museum of Art
Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis
The Church at Auvers
Vincent van Gogh, 1890
Musée d’Orsay
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
The Sower
Vincent van Gogh, 1888
The Van Gogh Museum
Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Stavros Niarcos
Umbrella with Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ print
© 2018 The Umbrella Shoppe
The Starry Night (Van Gogh 1889) Dinner Set – 4 Pc
© 2014-2017 RNK Innovations
Sunflowers
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Van Gogh Museum
Wheatfield with Crows
Vincent van Gogh, 1890
Van Gogh Museum
Olive Trees
Vincent van Gogh, 1889
National Gallery of Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/4971/olive-trees
- ‘Vincent van Gogh: Olive Trees’, National Galleries Scotland (collections online)
- ‘Vincent van Gogh: The Olive Trees’, MoMA (collections online)
- ‘Vincent van Gogh’, Art UK
- ‘Van Gogh’, Smarthistory
- ‘Vincent van Gogh’s Life and Work’, Van Gogh Museum
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