Van Gogh and the Consolation of Trees
A revelatory show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reunites 24 paintings of cypresses
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Van Gogh and the Consolation of Trees
A revelatory show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reunites 24 paintings of cypresses and unchains them from their somber associations.
By Deborah Solomon
Published May 11, 2023
Updated May 14, 2023, 12:31 p.m. ET
It might seem logical that Vincent van Gogh, the most famous depressive in all of art, adopted the Mediterranean cypress tree as a motif. The tall, tapered, cone-shaped evergreen has always carried associations of mourning and death. It stands sentinel in Christian, Jewish and Muslim cemeteries across southern Europe and the Near East.
But van Gogh, to judge from his own writings, saw the tree differently. “The cypresses still preoccupy me,” he wrote in June 1889, in a letter to his indefatigably devoted brother, Theo. “I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that no one has done them as I see them.”
The tree did inspire him to new arboreal heights, as we see in “Van Gogh’s Cypresses,” a revelatory and appealingly green exhibition that begins previews next week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before a public debut May 22. The show seems especially relevant at a time when the catastrophe of climate change is leading many contemporary artists to place nature at the center of their work and muse on the “consolation” (a favorite van Gogh word) afforded by trees.
The Met brings together 24 paintings, along with 15 drawings and four illustrated letters in which the cypress makes an appearance — not always as the main subject. The show includes “Starry Night” (from the Museum of Modern Art), which happens to feature, in addition to the hypnotic rhythms of its swirling sky, a pair of cypresses that have long gone uncelebrated and unnoticed.
Van Gogh, who committed suicide at age 37, began painting cypresses toward the end of his life. At the time, the Dutch-born artist was living in the south of France and turning out some of his strongest works. The Met exhibition unfolds slowly, with cypresses initially poking up as generic foliage in the far distance of his landscapes from Arles. But he zeroed in on the motif in the summer of 1889, after suffering a mental collapse and voluntarily entering the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Confined at first to the hospital grounds, he painted views of the fields outside his iron-barred bedroom window and studied blue irises in the garden.
Within a few weeks, he was deemed well enough to venture beyond the hospital walls. Carrying his portable easel and box of paints, he traipsed to nearby fields and was struck by the sight of individual cypresses growing in the wild. He wondered, as he later put it, how he could capture this “dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape.” (The cypresses he saw in Provence, by the way, should not be confused with the bald cypress found in America, a staple of Louisiana swamps and gothic movies.)
In some ways, van Gogh’s cypresses might sound like a slender premise for a show. Just last year, “Van Gogh and the Olive Groves,” a similarly hyper-focused look at the period when the artist was hospitalized in Saint-Rémy, appeared at the Dallas Museum of Art and elsewhere. Such niche exhibitions perhaps reflect post-pandemic cutbacks, but they also represent a welcome aesthetic trend, providing an alternative to the blockbuster parade of the past and allowing for the macro pleasure that comes from taking in art on a micro basis, one painting at a time.
Mystery of the Pebbles
On a recent April afternoon, I visited the Met’s conservation studio, after receiving an intriguing tip: A bunch of actual pebbles had been located in one of his paintings of cypresses.
The Sherman Fairchild Paintings Conservation Center, as it is officially known, occupies a vast, high-ceilinged duplex on the mezzanine floor. I arrived to find two of van Gogh’s best-known paintings — both from the Met’s collection — resting upright on wooden easels. Their frames had been removed, and the sight elicited the mild shock that comes from seeing a masterpiece revert from its gilded life into a plainly handcrafted object. Charlotte Hale, a painting conservator, and Silvia A. Centeno, a research scientist, explained with visible excitement that the two paintings were done within days of each other in June 1889, “an explosive month,” as Hale stressed in her British accent.
The canvases could not be more different. “Wheat Field With Cypresses,” which measures 29 inches tall and 3 feet wide, offers a shining view of the Provençal countryside on a gusty, hold-onto-your-hat day. Stalks of yellow wheat bend in the wind; clouds tumble across the sky; the purplish-blue limestone hills known as the Alpilles undulate in the distance. And then, on the right side, there it is. The cypress tree, its dark-emerald foliage contrasting with the bright sky. Actually, make that two cypress trees. It can be startling to realize that a smaller tree is leaning against a taller one, like​ human figures with their sides touching.
The painting on the other easel, “Cypresses,” also offers a view of two cypresses, this one in dramatic close-up. The canvas is turned vertically and the top of the taller tree appears lopped off to compress its shape into a bulky, churning mass. Again, I thought of two figures and wondered if van Gogh had opted to paint a pair of cypresses to suggest a cozy feeling of togetherness.
In a technical investigation of “Cypresses,” Hale and Centeno, using a microscope and the chemical process known as XRF (for X-ray fluorescence mapping), discovered a few new things. Among them was the surprising presence of rock matter in the pigment. Sand and limestone pebbles — the largest is a quarter-inch in diameter — are embedded across the surface of the canvas, especially in the impastoed foreground.
The discovery confirmed what scholars had already known: Most of “Cypresses” was painted outdoors, “in situ,” as Hale said, adding that van Gogh applied the finishing touches to the painting back in his studio. Using a wooden pointer, she singled out four pebbles visible to the naked eye. “We know they’re there,” she remarked, “but we can’t know exactly how they got there.”
Was it possible that van Gogh had deliberately added handfuls of sand and pebbles to his paint to thicken his impasto and give it a grittier texture?
“Absolutely not,” Hale replied. “I think what may have happened is that his easel blew over. The wind was so strong.”
But that is only a theory, as both conservators emphasized. And other theories will no doubt sprout, especially because most of us prefer thinking about beloved paintings as reflections of an artist’s will rather than a mere accident of weather.
A few days later, I mentioned the pebble story to an artist-friend, who hastily proposed: “I think what happened is that van Gogh was disgusted with the painting and threw a handful of dirt at it.”
Van Gogh’s devotion to painting from nature and daylight had become controversial by the end of the 1880s, when vanguard artists were pushing their work away from Impressionism and toward the more subjective styles of symbolism and expressionism. A strong challenge came from Paul Gauguin, a friend of van Gogh’s, or rather a frenemy. The story of how van Gogh, a lonely spirit who longed for companionship, invited Gauguin to stay with him in the Yellow House in Arles has often been recounted. Instead of lifting van Gogh’s mood, the visit was a disaster, leading to the alarming ear-cutting incident and his incarceration at the asylum.
The friction between the two was partly philosophical. Van Gogh’s mud-thick and choppy brushwork irritated Gauguin, who favored a decorative style based on smooth expanses of color. Gauguin kept pressuring him to be more contemporary — to represent the contents of his imagination rather than recording the mundane wheat fields and other visual facts. A painting of what one sees can be far more inventive than what one imagines, but Gauguin didn’t want to hear it.
At the same time, van Gogh did want to experiment with Gauguin’s approach — with the novel idea of working indoors and synthesizing forms into a composite that had no equivalent in nature. The experiment led to a colossal project, “Starry Night,” surely the most celebrated landscape painting in all of art history.
Granted, you might not think of “Starry Night” as a cypress-tree painting. It is known universally as a picture of a nocturnal sky glittering with stars. But the tops of two trees in the left foreground of the painting provide a surge of vertical energy and the all-important symbolic link between ground and sky. Van Gogh borrowed the image of the trees from another painting of his, a canvas that cannot travel from the National Gallery Prague.
To Susan Alyson Stein, the curator of the Met exhibition, “Starry Night” is “a composite in the fullest sense of the word,” as she writes in the catalog. Perhaps that’s why the painting feels less like a tangible landscape than an ink-blue hallucination.
A Tangible Mother-and-Child Bond
Why did van Gogh often paint two connected trees rather than a single one? Was that how he found them in the fields? The catalog doesn’t say.
Seeking an answer, I called the New York Botanical Garden and was referred to Damon Little, a 47-year-old botanist who holds the title of curator of bioinformatics. As it turned out, Little wrote his dissertation on the 31 species of the genus cupressus — the cypress tree. I emailed him reproductions of four well-known van Gogh paintings, and we spoke by phone. He said that that each of the paintings, including the less naturalistic and more abstracted “Starry Night,” contained a pair of cypresses, one tree taller than the other. It was certainly a sight, he added, that van Gogh could have glimpsed in the landscape.
The seeds of the cypress are eccentrically shaped, with centers that resemble “thick pancakes.” “Their seeds don’t disperse very well, so you’ll often find a mother tree and the offspring around it,” he said.
A mother tree with her offspring? Little’s comment suggested new interpretive possibilities, and for a moment the cypress seemed like a different tree. Van Gogh had unchained it from its age-old funereal associations and reinvented it as a tour de force of emotional connection and nurturance. Is that what van Gogh meant when he described his astonishment that “no one has done them as I see them”?
Impossible to say. The air around his cypresses remains thick with opposing approaches, from the metaphysical to the earnestly botanical to the suddenly topical question raised by the Case of the Embedded Pebbles. Leave it to van Gogh to turn a tree he espied in the landscape into a profound mystery, bringing new life to an ancient symbol.
Van Gogh’s Cypresses
Previews May 16; opens May 22-Aug. 27, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org.
Deborah Solomon is an art critic and biographer who is currently writing a biography of Jasper Johns.
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