Olive Grove

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Olive Grove: Vincent van Gogh

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Vincent van Gogh Oil Painting - Olive Grove

Keywords: Olive, Grove

Work Overview: Olive Grove
Vincent van Gogh
Date: 1889; Saint-rémy-de-provence, France *
Style: Post-Impressionism
Genre: landscape
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 92 x 72 cm
Location: Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Vincent van Gogh painted at least 18 paintings of olive trees, mostly in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889.

Artistic style
Van Gogh's early works were made with dull, gray colors.[22] In Paris, he met leading French artists Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat and others who provided illuminating influences on the use of color and technique. His work, previously somber and dark, now "blazed with color." Indeed, van Gogh's use of color became so dramatic that he was sometimes called an Expressionist. But it was southern France that provided an opportunity for him to express his "surging emotions."[23] Enlightened by the effects of its sun-drenched countryside, van Gogh reported that above all, his work "promises color".[24] This is where he began development of his masterpieces.[23]

Van Gogh captured the colors and moods of the trees which varied dramatically by daylight and season.[12] He began to use the color blue to represent the divine. In both The Starry Night and his olive tree paintings, van Gogh used the intense blue of the sky to symbolize the "divine and infinite presence" of Jesus. Seeking a "modern artistic language" to represent the divine, he sought a numinous quality in many of his olive tree paintings, such as by bathing olive trees, an emblem for Jesus, in "radiant gold light"

Van Gogh used the Impressionist concept of broken color to give light to a work, innovatively drawing in color, giving the painting light and form, as he also did in his paintings of plowed fields, mountains, rocks, and heads and figures.[26] The series is unified by a more refined approach, without the thick application of paint to which he was more accustomed.[19]

Meaning
The National Gallery of Art summarizes this series:
"In the olive trees — in the expressive power of their ancient and gnarled forms — van Gogh found a manifestation of the spiritual force he believed resided in all of nature. His brushstrokes make the soil and even the sky seem alive with the same rustling motion as the leaves, stirred to a shimmer by the Mediterranean wind. These strong individual dashes do not seem painted so much as drawn onto the canvas with a heavily loaded brush. The energy in their continuous rhythm communicates to us, in an almost physical way, the living force that van Gogh found within the trees themselves, the very spiritual force that he believed had shaped them."[10]
Skye Jethani, author of The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity, asserts that in many of his paintings, the olive tree series in particular, van Gogh conveys the redemptive quality of sorrow and that even in sorrow, there can be rejoicing. To quote van Gogh's sermon of 1876:

"Sorrow is better than joy... for by the sadness of the countenance, the heart is made better. Our nature is sorrowful, but for those who have learnt and are learning to look at Jesus Christ, there will always be reason to rejoice. It is a good word, that of St. Paul: as being sorrowful yet also rejoicing."

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Vincent van Gogh

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