Women Picking Olives

Women Picking Olives, one of at least 15 paintings of olive groves that Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh created in 1889 during his voluntary confinement in the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint Rémy in Provence and one of three versions depicting three women picking olives.

Van Gogh was fascinated by the gnarled, twisting branches of the olive trees just outside the asylum walls. To him they conveyed strength, anguish, and survival. In addition, there were the biblical associations. For van Gogh, who had been a lay preacher in his youth, they were inextricably linked with Christ’s suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane, at the foot of the Mount of Olives. The biblical link was in the forefront of van Gogh’s mind, because in 1889 both Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard painted a version of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane; in the former Gauguin replaced Christ’s features with his own. Van Gogh admired the concept but was not comfortable with the idea of producing religious scenes from imagination himself. He preferred to give “an impression of anguish without aiming straight at the historic Garden of Gethsemane.”

This version of three women using a ladder to pick olives is the clearest and most stylized of the three. The women are in the center of the painting. The colors are muted, with grey-green leaves and a pink sky, and an overall sense of peace is conveyed, as the women calmly help each other reach the highest fruits on the tree.