Vincent van Gogh The Olive Orchard 1889 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, Chester Dale Collection

This scene of an olive orchard is another powerful landscape by Van Gogh. Venerable, gnarled olive trees are omnipresent in the south of France, and Van Gogh made them the focus of at least fifteen paintings during his last six to seven months of life. He found the subject demanding and compelling, writing, "the rustle of the olive grove has something very secret in it, and immensely old. It is too beautiful for us to dare to paint it, or be able to imagine it."

That did not keep Vincent from trying. One of his most admirable traits as an artist was his persistent efforts to express the inexpressible, to communicate the mysteries of the world around him. He wrote to Theo that he was struggling to catch the olive trees. "They are old silver, sometimes with more blue in them, sometimes greenish, bronzed, fading white above a soil which is yellow, pink, violet, tinted orange....Very difficult."

When one looks at this painting, one can see that Van Gogh is less concerned with visual reality than with emotional and spiritual reality. It depicts another harvest scene, with women picking olives, the fruit that sustains their lives. But the way the trees and the landscape almost merge and the workers are engulfed in the branches suggests that Van Gogh is trying to express an emotional bond both within nature and between the landscape and the humans whose lives it supports through its bounty and permanence.

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