Museum of Art in Baltimore: Woman Walking Under the Trees (L'Oliver)

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Woman Walking Under the Trees (L’Oliver)
Vincent van Gogh entered the Saint –Paul-de Mausole asylum at the Saint-Remy in May 1989. Van Gogh checked into the asylum as a third-class voluntary patient (Hanson and Elisabeth 288). During his time here, he did not leave the area of the asylum during the first weeks of his treatment. However, he started to venture outside the walls of the asylum from June 1889 and did his paintings of the gardens of the asylum. Further, when he got permission to venture outside the walls of the asylum, he began painting the nearby olive trees, wheat fields, as well as cypresses. Ultimately, he started painting the landscape from how he could see from the asylum, and from the time he spent outside the asylum. It was during this time that Van Gogh painted a series of paintings on olive orchards and one of them was the painting about the Woman Walking under the Trees (L’Oliver) (Hanson and Elisabeth 288).
The Woman Walking under the Trees (L’Oliver) was painted by van Gogh in November 1889 in Saint-Remy. It is an oil canvas, 50 x 65 cm that van Gogh painted from nature, but accentuated by Seurat-like stippling and schematic passages of broken color. The Woman Walking under the Trees is located at the Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. This painting is a depiction of relief and calmness in the interaction with nature. Further, it is also tries to show how individuals through their interaction with nature, can find a connection with the divine (Van Heugten 64).


Woman Walking Under the Trees (L’Oliver)
In the Woman Walking under the Trees, van Gogh uses soft contrast so as to achieve a balanced feel. Looking at the broad brush strokes, they create large and exciting forms. The colors in the painting are subdued and subtle as evident in the landscape, horizon, and the sky. Van Gogh does not use a large range of brightness because he wants to express the serene and divine nature of the painting. He uses the tones of the tree trunks, the foliage, and the earth to connect them with the bluish horizon, as well as the sky, and the greens and grays match the trees and the environment. Ideally, the fact that he does not use extreme color contrast, the painting projects a sense of calmness, as well as near-dreaminess. The tree tops move with the same irregular wave. This makes the painting projec...