The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy)
Workmen repairing the road under huge plane trees on a boulevard in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence — the avenue is still there.
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
The painting depicts a real landscape or cityscape. The precise viewpoint the artist used may be unknown, so the marker shows the general area.
The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy) — at a glance
- Artist
- Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
- Year
- 1889
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Place
- A boulevard in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France
- Viewpoint
- A tree-lined town boulevard near the asylum — Saint-Rémy still has its plane-tree avenues
- Medium
- Oil on cloth (patterned support)
- Dimensions
- c. 74 × 93 cm
- Now at
- Cleveland Museum of Art
Overview
The Large Plane Trees is one of the pictures Vincent van Gogh painted in his last months in Provence, in December 1889, during his year as a voluntary patient at the Saint-Paul asylum outside Saint-Rémy. It shows a line of massive, knotted plane trees along a town boulevard, their trunks mottled, workmen digging up the cobbles and setting new stones below, and a few townspeople and a shopfront beyond. It is oil on canvas, about 74 by 93 cm, and it hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Van Gogh painted it, unusually, on a piece of printed tablecloth or toweling; the woven pattern shows through the paint.
Where was The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy) painted?
Scholarship The setting is one of the tree-lined boulevards that ring the old centre of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, a small town in the Alpilles hills. Van Gogh had leave to walk into the town from the asylum a short way south. Saint-Rémy still has its avenues of big pollarded plane trees along the boulevards, so the kind of place is entirely recognisable, though the exact stretch and the shopfronts have changed.
What is in the painting?
Four or five enormous plane trees fill the picture, their pale, blotched trunks rising out of the frame, autumn leaves still clinging in orange and green. At their feet, two or three road menders bend over the broken roadway, a pile of paving stones and sand beside them. Behind, a low wall, a bench with seated figures, a shopfront with an awning, and a strip of pale sky.
Look closely
The blotched trunks
The plane trees' piebald grey-green-and-pink bark is painted in swirling strokes, filling the picture.
The road menders
Two or three workmen bend over the dug-up roadway, small at the foot of the trees, with a heap of paving stones.
The cloth weave
The woven pattern of the tablecloth support ripples through the paint surface.
The shopfront
An awninged shop and a bench with seated figures show between the trunks.
Analysis
Composition and technique
Vast tree trunks crowd the foreground, dwarfing the workmen, with the town glimpsed between them.
Scholarship Van Gogh sets the trunks close and large, cropped top and bottom, so the trees dominate and the human activity is small at their base. The bark is painted in swirling, curling strokes; the woven texture of the cloth support adds a further ripple to the surface.
Colour and light
Mottled grey-green and pink trunks and orange leaves against a pale blue-white sky.
The palette is autumnal and cool — the piebald bark of the planes in grey, green and rose, russet and green leaves, blue-grey shadow on the road, warm ochre in the paving and the shopfront.
History & provenance
The painting passed through European and American collections and is in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Sources
- Cleveland Museum of Art — collection entry for Vincent van Gogh, ‘The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy)’ (1889)
- ‘Vincent van Gogh: The Letters’ (Van Gogh Museum) — Saint-Rémy, autumn 1889
Related paintings
Current display status
Display status unknownMore by Vincent van Gogh
Café Terrace at Night
The Church at Auvers
Starry Night Over the Rhone
Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
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