Van Gogh’s Cypresses: Follow the Lines

Start at the top of the tallest tree. Its tip meets the edge of the painting, leaving almost no sky above it. Then let your eye travel down through the dark foliage, past the exposed trunks and into the yellow-green ground. In Vincent van Gogh’s Cypresses, the landscape feels active before you have named a single brushstroke.

Van Gogh painted this work in late June 1889 at Saint-Rémy. The original is an oil painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection. Our Cypresses (1889) art print reproduces this particular composition: the towering trees, blue hills and yellow crescent at the upper right. It is a physical, unframed print.

Begin with the dark shape

From a few steps away, the cypresses read as one dense silhouette. Look closer and that apparent solid mass breaks into small curls of green, yellow, brown and nearly black paint. The smaller tree rises on the left; the larger one pushes upward through the middle. Their uneven outlines give your eye something to follow.

Try covering the pale sky with your hand for a moment. The trees become a tangle of marks. Uncover it, and their shape immediately gathers itself again. The light surrounding the foliage does as much work as the dark paint within it.

Follow a curve into the sky

Now choose one curl near the tree’s right edge and look for a similar movement outside it. The cream clouds bend and loop. Pale strokes turn through the turquoise sky. Even the yellow crescent belongs to this family of curves, although its outline is much easier to pick out.

The colors separate tree from sky, but the repeated movements connect them. You can follow the picture without treating each object as a stop: foliage leads into cloud, cloud into hill, hill into the plants below. That is a useful way to look at this painting when its busy surface first feels overwhelming.

Give the foreground a turn

It is easy to spend all your time in the upper half. Look down instead. At the trees’ feet, short yellow strokes gather into tufts; larger green forms roll across the lower right. Behind them, the blue ridge makes a sloping route back toward the sky.

Spend a minute tracing that circuit, then step back. The painting still has one unmistakable anchor—the tall dark trees—but the smaller movements keep it from feeling static.

Living with the print

A quiet frame and some clear wall around this image give its crowded marks room to register. Before choosing a size, think about where you will stand: across a room you will notice the silhouette and color; closer up, you will spend more time with the individual strokes. The RPS print is sold unframed; any framing shown in product styling is illustrative.

Continue with our Vincent van Gogh artist profile, or revisit this work and follow a different line each time.