Cypresses

Two cypresses rise against a sky filled with swirling cloud marks, a view painted in the first months after van Gogh arrived at the asylum of Saint-Rémy in June 1889; he returned to the trees as a subject in the following summer. He wrote that they were “beautiful in line and proportion, like an Egyptian obelisk” and that they demanded all his attention. The pair of trees shows the swirling rhythm he brought to the Provençal countryside in these last years of his life.