Vincent in Saint-Rémy
(1889)

From The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York:

Van Gogh advocated painting from nature rather than inventing a motif from the imagination. On a personal level, he felt that painting outdoors would help to restore his health, a sentiment he often voiced when writing to his brother, Theo. He mentioned this painting several times in his letters, relating it to a passage from Edouard Rod’s Le Sens de la vie. In one note he wrote, “I rather like the ‘Entrance to a Quarry’—I was doing it when I felt this attack coming on—because to my mind the somber greens go well with the ocher tones; there is something sad in it which is healthy, and that is why it does not bore me. Perhaps that is true of the ‘Mountain’ too. They will tell me that mountains are not like that and that there are black outlines of a finger’s width. But after all it seemed to me it expressed the passage in Rod’s book . . . about a desolate country of somber mountains, among which are some dark goatherds’ huts where sunflowers are blooming.”

The complete letter: https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let784/letter.html

Mountains at Saint-Rémy with Dark Cottage


July, 1889


Oil on canvas
71.8 x 90.8 cm.
New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Justin K. Thannhauser Collection
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/1491