Women Picking Olives

Van Gogh painted this in November 1889, during his stay at the asylum at Saint-Remy-de-Provence. He was allowed to paint outdoors under supervision, and the olive groves around the asylum became one of his repeated subjects. Three women are bent over in an olive grove, picking olives from the ground. The trees fill the upper two-thirds of the canvas, their trunks twisted and their canopies painted in silvery greens and blues. The women are small in scale, their figures rendered in dark blues and browns against the pale earth. The sky is barely visible through the branches. The canvas is roughly 29 by 36 inches, horizontal in format. Van Gogh had been at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole since May 1889. He painted at least fifteen canvases of olive groves that autumn, working in the fields near the asylum. He wrote to Theo in October that the olive trees had "a silvery gray foliage, now green, now whitish, and sometimes also a little violet, and their trunks are sometimes gray, sometimes bluish, sometimes orange-ish, sometimes reddish-brown." This painting captures that range of color in the trees. This painting belongs to the same period as The Starry Night and the wheat field series. Van Gogh was producing some of his most recognized work at Saint-Remy, painting the same landscape repeatedly under different conditions of light and weather. The olive grove paintings are less known than the wheat fields but were painted with the same concentrated attention. Oil on canvas, 72.6 by 92.1 centimeters. Van Gogh used short, curved strokes for the tree canopies, building the silvery green in layers. The earth is painted in broader strokes of yellow ochre and pale brown. The greens and silvery tones of this painting make it suitable for rooms with natural light and plant life. It works well in a living room or sunroom with white walls and wood furniture. The 18x24 framed version in a natural wood frame complements the organic palette. The painting was acquired by the Met through the bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot in 1967. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 24x36 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.