13
The Park of the Hospital at Saint-Rémy, 1889
Melancholy permeates this powerful depiction of the garden at Saint-Rémy, which is dominated by a sawn-off pine tree that had been struck by lightning. In a letter to his friend, the painter Emile Bernard (1868-1941), in November 1889, Van Gogh described the tree as a ‘dark giant—like a proud man brought low’ and detailed how he combined composition, colour and technique to convey the anxiety felt by his fellow patients at the hospital.
Oil on canvas
Museum Folkwang, Essen