The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy)1889
Like Two Poplars in the Alpilles near Saint-Rémy (on view nearby), Vincent van Gogh painted this autumnal landscape while living in a psychiatric hospital near Saint-Rémy in southern France where he was treated for severe depression. More about this work
About this work
Like Two Poplars in the Alpilles near Saint-Rémy (on view nearby), Vincent van Gogh painted this autumnal landscape while living in a psychiatric hospital near Saint-Rémy in southern France where he was treated for severe depression. Understanding that painting from nature eased his symptoms, Van Gogh’s physician permitted the artist to paint landscapes outside. Van Gogh described this painting in a letter to his brother Theo: “The last study I did is a view of the village, where they were at work under some enormous plane trees—repairing the pavements. . . . There are heaps of sand, stones, and the gigantic trunks—the leaves yellowing and here and there you can get a glimpse of a house front and small figures.”
Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art.
How it was made
- Oil paint
- Pigment ground in a drying oil, usually linseed. It dries slowly, so painters could blend on the canvas, build up thin translucent glazes, and rework a picture over weeks. Canvas replaced wooden panels in the 1500s because it is lighter and can be rolled.
Vincent van Gogh
Dutch, 1853–1890 · Born in Zundert; died in Auvers-sur-Oise.
Van Gogh worked as an art dealer, teacher and lay preacher before he turned to art in 1880, at twenty-seven. His early pictures of Dutch peasants are dark and heavy; in Paris from 1886 he met the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, and his palette brightened. In Arles in 1888–89 he painted with intense colour and thick, directional strokes, and he worked on at the asylum in Saint-Rémy and finally at Auvers-sur-Oise. The Poet’s Garden belongs to a group made to decorate Gauguin’s room in the Yellow House.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Post-Impressionism
Artists who kept Impressionism's colour but pushed towards structure, symbol and feeling.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Cleveland Museum of Art has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1947.209
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art
- Type
- Painting
- Department
- Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
