Olive Trees

A grove of olive trees twists across the canvas, their trunks bent and knotted against a landscape built from greens, browns, purples, and yellows. The painting, titled Olive Trees, was made by Vincent van Gogh in 1889 using oil on canvas, and it is held today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work came into the museum's collection through the Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg gift and bequest. Van Gogh, working in a style tied to Post-Impressionism, brought the same intensity to this grove that he gave to his landscapes generally. Looking closely at the trunks reveals how the twisting lines of the bark seem to echo the movement of the branches and the hills beyond them, giving the whole scene a restless, living quality that draws the eye slowly across the composition from one gnarled form to the next.