The olive groves of 1889

The record dates Olive Grove to 1889. Olives are the defining motif of that year in this catalogue: twelve works dated 1889 name olive trees or olive picking, and not one work from any other year does. The titles distinguish them by sky and by activity — bright blue sky, pale blue sky, orange sky, yellow sky and sun, picking figures, women picking olives. It is the clearest case in the record of a painter running variations on one motif under changing conditions.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 73 x 92 cm — the size that recurs more often than any other in this catalogue — and it is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The measured palette returns green and yellow as the dominant families.

Why the cluster is dated, not placed

Olive cultivation belongs to Provence, and the record places the whole cluster in a single year, 1889, which is the year the chronology assigns to Saint-Rémy from the spring onwards. This catalogue reports that date and that grouping. It does not assign a month to any of the twelve, and it does not put them in an order, because the record it works from carries a year and nothing finer.