Olive Orchard

Van Gogh painted this olive grove in 1889, during his stay at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where the surrounding fields and orchards became his main subject. Olive trees fascinated him. He made around fifteen paintings of them that year, chasing the way their leaves shifted from silver to bronze to green depending on the light. Here the ground is worked in long ribbons of blue, cream and ochre that swirl around the trunks like water, while the trees themselves twist and bend as if caught mid-movement. The red poppies at the lower left are the only sharp accents in the whole scene.

The painting holds an odd little secret. In 2017, a conservator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City was examining the surface under magnification and found a grasshopper embedded in the paint near the bottom edge, stuck there for more than a century. Researchers determined the insect was already dead when it landed, since there was no sign of struggle in the wet paint. Van Gogh worked outdoors in windy Provence and complained in letters about dust, sand and flies landing on his canvases, so the intruder fits the story perfectly. He also had bigger ideas for these orchards, hoping the gnarled trees could carry a sense of the sacred without any religious figures in sight, a quiet argument with painter friends who were busy putting Christ into their own olive gardens.