Olive Trees

This is one of five pictures of olive orchards that Van Gogh made in November 1889. Painted directly from nature but animated by Seurat-like stippling and stylized passages of broken color, these works responded to recent compositions by Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. “What I’ve done is a rather harsh and coarse realism beside their abstractions,” Van Gogh observed, “but it will nevertheless impart a rustic note, and will smell of the soil.”