Olive Trees by Van Gogh (MoMA): Swirling Sky and Twisted Trunks

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Olive groves below the Alpilles

Around the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Van Gogh lived from May 1889, the hillsides were covered with olive groves. In June 1889 he painted this view of twisted olive trees beneath the jagged Alpilles mountains and a great white cloud.

The painting belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which also owns The Starry Night, painted the same month. Van Gogh came back to the olive groves again and again that year, making some fifteen paintings of them.

A cloud that swirls like a wave

Cream and yellow cloud curling across a blue sky — A cloud that loops like a wave.

A huge cream and yellow cloud loops across the blue sky. Its curling strokes are close relatives of the swirls in The Starry Night. Nothing in the sky is still.

Dark blue mountain shapes outlined with heavy strokes — The Alpilles in dark blue.

Below it, the Alpilles rise in dark blue shapes outlined with heavy strokes, more like waves than rock.

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Trunks that twist and turn

Twisting olive trunks in dark blue and green lines — Trunks that twist and fork.

The olive trunks bend and fork in dark blue and green lines. Their foliage is made of short, silvery-green strokes that seem to shimmer in the wind. Van Gogh wrote that the rustle of an olive grove was something very secret and immensely old.

Even the ground moves

Curving bands of grass and pale yellow earth — Even the ground moves.

In the foreground, the earth is painted in pale yellows and greens with curving bands of grass and shadow. The same rhythm runs through ground, trees, mountains and sky, so the whole landscape seems to share one movement.

Many viewers link this energy to Van Gogh’s state of mind in the asylum. He himself described the olive trees as a subject he wanted to master, as Millet and others had mastered the wheat fields.

Questions about Olive Trees

When and where was it painted?

In June 1889, near the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Where is the original?

The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Is it related to The Starry Night?

Yes. It was painted in the same month and shares the same swirling handling of sky and hills.

How large is it?

About 72.6 × 91.4 centimetres, oil on canvas.

Sources and image credit

Public-domain reproduction of The Olive Trees (1889), via Wikimedia Commons. Detail images are crops of the same historical painting; no reconstruction or upscaling.