The Mulberry Tree

Van Gogh painted The Mulberry Tree in October 1889 during his voluntary confinement at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He had committed himself there in May of that year following the breakdown that ended his time in Arles, and the asylum's garden and surrounding grounds became his primary subject through those months. The mulberry tree he depicted stood in the courtyard of the institution; he wrote to his brother Theo describing it as "magnificent" against the blue sky and noting that he worked on the canvas in a single session of intense concentration. The work belongs to a remarkable cluster of tree studies from Saint-Rémy, including the series of olive groves and the famous cypresses, in which Van Gogh treated the individual tree as a vehicle for expressing forces far larger than botany. Post-Impressionism is the movement that accommodates this ambition: inherited Impressionist colour and plein-air directness are pushed toward deliberate expressive distortion and structural invention. The Mulberry Tree entered the collection of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, where it remains one of the institution's most visited works. When it was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984 as part of a landmark Van Gogh retrospective, critics singled out its combination of documentary precision and psychological intensity as exemplary of the artist's late achievement.