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Road With Cypresses by Van Gogh
Road With CypressesOil on canvas, 1890 Van Gogh described Road With Cypresses, one of the last he did in the south, in a letter to Gauguin: “A cypress with a star, a last attempt – a night sky with a moon without radiance, the slender crescent barely emerging from the opaque shadow cast by the earth – a star with exaggerated brilliance. Very romantic if you like, but Provence also I think”. Here, in all its virtuosity and controlled effect, is the wonderful brush stroke of these later pictures, tying together pictorial surface and perspective depth, as it unites the flow of the road with the movement of the heavens. The “late wayfarers” are small, but still at home in the spectacle around them, and the single cypress holds its own against the universal panorama. Cypresses, which featured more and more frequently in Van Gogh’s last paintings, fascinated him, though at first he found them difficult to paint. They seemed to take a dominant part in the landscape, because of both their form and their color. He told his brother in 1889 that the cypresses were always occupying his thoughts. “It astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them… a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes and the most difficult to hit off exactly”. Own An Original Re-Creation
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Hand-painted in oils by a professional artist
