The Olive Trees (1889)-full by Vincent van Gogh HD Download

The Olive Trees (1889)-full by Vincent van Gogh

The Olive Trees

Vincent van Gogh

Artist Vincent van Gogh

Date 1889

Medium Oil on canvas

Collection Museum of Modern Art

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1800 x 1429 pixels · 2.56 MB · JPEG

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4043 x 3211 pixels · 8.62 MB · JPEG

About the Artist

Vincent van Gogh

Dutch (1853–1890)

Dutch post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, born in Zundert, Netherlands, revolutionized modern art with his emotive brushwork and vivid color palettes. Despite a turbulent life marked by mental illness and poverty, he produced over 2,000 artworks, including masterpieces like The Starry Night and Sunflowers. His career began in earnest at age 27 after abandoning earlier pursuits in art dealing and religious ministry. Van Gogh’s work, initially dismissed as chaotic, later became foundational to Expressionism and Fauvism. He died by suicide at 37, leaving a legacy that reshaped 20th-century art.

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Artwork Story

Vincent van Gogh’s *The Olive Trees* from 1889 is one of those paintings where you can almost feel the wind moving through the branches—except, well, it’s van Gogh, so the wind feels more like a visible force, something alive and thrashing. Painted during his stay in Saint-Rémy, where he was voluntarily hospitalized, the work sits in this weird space between serenity and frenzy. The olive trees twist and curl like they’re caught mid-dance, their leaves rendered in quick, staccato strokes that make the whole scene vibrate. It’s not peaceful, exactly, but there’s a kind of raw energy to it, like the landscape itself is breathing.
You can’t talk about this one without thinking about how van Gogh saw olive trees as almost sacred, these gnarled, ancient things that carried something biblical in their roots. He wrote about them to Theo, calling them “difficult” to paint—which, coming from him, means something. Compared to the cypresses he obsessed over around the same time, the olives feel less like torches and more like tangled knots of life, all rough bark and silver-green leaves. There’s a weird tension in how the sky swirls above them, like it’s trying to pull the trees up into the air. And the colors—god, the colors—those blues and yellows clashing in a way that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. It’s messy, but it’s the kind of mess that makes you stop and stare.
What’s fascinating, though, is how this painting doesn’t stand alone. You can see echoes of it in his other Saint-Rémy works, where the landscapes start to feel less like places and more like states of mind. The olive groves, the wheat fields, even the starry nights—they’re all part of the same frantic, beautiful conversation van Gogh was having with the world. And *The Olive Trees* might just be one of the loudest entries in that conversation. It’s not pretty in the traditional sense, but it’s alive in a way that sticks with you. You look at it and think, yeah, this is what it feels like to see the world burning and growing at the same time.

Tags: Trees