The Mulberry Tree (Van Gogh)

On 8 May 1889, van Gogh voluntarily entered the asylum Saint Paul-de-Mausole, where, over the course of the year, he painted some 150 canvases. During his stay in hospital, Vincent painted landscapes and continued to study the effects of colour. During the first few months of his orderly life in the hospital, the painter had a positive effect. In the first week of October, Vincent painted several paintings, including The Mulberry Tree, The Reaper and Entrance to a Quarry. He also made a painting of the trees in the courtyard, of which he seemed proud; he wrote, "I have two views of the gardens and the asylum in which this place looks very attractive. I’ve tried to reconstruct it as it might have been, simplifying and accentuating the proud, unchanging nature of the pine trees and the clumps of cedar against the blue." In a letter to his brother, Theo, van Gogh described his delight in capturing the season's essence: "I’ll tell you that we’re having some superb autumn days, and that I’m taking advantage of them." When van Gogh painted the solitary mulberry tree - not much bigger than a shrub - orange and red, with foliage filling an entire canvas. Vincent experimented with all the styles of the past, from the thin paint and loose texture of Paris to the sculptural impasto of Monticelli; from the swarms of Impressionist brushstrokes to the plates of Japanese paint. Throughout certain parts of the canvas he applied paint with the lightest touch possible - mere glances of hue - to show the falling of leaves; then in different sections he loaded his brush with spades of pigment to paint the serpentine web of bare tree limbs left behind. Vincent found a deep connection with the expressive qualities of trees. He would view them with human characteristics. Vincent wrote to Theo in 1881 about the same sense of similarity between trees and figures: "If we don’t draw figures, or else trees as though they were figures, then we’re like people who have no spine, or at least one that’s too weak." ref?? During his year in the asylum, between some debilitating attacks, he averaged two paintings a week, along with detailed descriptions in letters to Theo about his progress. On 7 December 1889, van Gogh wrote to Theo describing the contents of three packages sent by parcel post containing various works of art, including The Mulberry Tree, of which van Gogh wrote: "The remainder is above all autumn studies and I think the best one is the yellow mulberry tree against a very blue sky." Van Gogh wrote to his sister Willemien van Gogh on 9 or 10 December 1889, describing the tree he had painted; "the garden too, with its espalier mulberry tree. As regards mulberry trees, there are a lot here. I painted one not long ago when its bushy foliage was a magnificent yellow against a very blue sky and a white, stony, sunlit field behind." == Interpretations ==

The work was exhibited at the Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1901. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, an Austrian visionary poet, recounted his visit in the form of a fictitious letter titled "Colors". He wrote about the sixty or so paintings, that were mostly landscapes where only few were the most important pictoral element. Hofmannsthal did not write about the style of the paintings, but he did note that he often saw paintings that resembled them. He went on to write more about his experience: "First they seemed to coarse and shrill in color tones, agitated and quite strange; ... then I saw them all that way, each one individually, and all of them together, and Nature in them, and the strength of the human soul that had been at work here, shaping Nature, and tree and bush, and field ... and in addition, something else, that which was 'behind' the painted surface, the true reality, the indescribably fateful-all this I perceived in such a way as to lose my self-awareness while looking at these pictures." On 24 April 1892, Charles Saunier, who wrote on French nineteenth- and twentieth-century arts. Wrote in L'endehors in a piece titled "Vincent van Gogh". Saunier noted that van Gogh's technique was complex and that "[van Gogh] often proceeded by flat tints, occasionally by divided tones". He went on to write, "The extraordinary Mulberry Tree is sculpted in a thick layer of cobalt and chrome yellow. This painter loved light and color and desired a simple art." Saunier emphasized van Gogh's ability to create a "complex, wholly intellectual art", that conveyed a sense of cheerfulness throughout his "Auvers orchards". == Provenance ==

• Camille Pissarro, Paris, until 1890, by inheritance to; • Madame C. Pissarro, Paris; • Ambroise Vollard, Paris. • Alphonse Kann (1870–1948), Saint Germain-en-Laye, until 1928, still in 1934, probably by inheritance to; • Michael Stewart, London. • David Gibbs, London and New York, sold on 19 October 1961 to; Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd. • Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd, London, sold on 12 November 1961 to; Norton Simon • Norton Simon, Gift 1976 to; Norton Simon Art Foundation. == See also ==