Fir-woods at Sunset

Catalogue numbers: F 652, JH 1843.

In addition to many canvases of the Proven�al olive groves, van Gogh painted ‘portraits’ of other kinds of trees typical of and epitomizing the South, cypresses and fir-trees. His treatment of these weather-beaten trees against a sunset sky confirms his revived interest in the artists and artistic tendencies with which he had been involved during his Dutch period, especially Barbizon landscape painting and the work of Jules Dupr� and Charles Daubigny. Both of these artists were well known to him from his years as an art dealer with Goupil and Company in The Hague, Paris and London. They had been the models to which he had turned when, in Drenthe, he attempted to make himself into a landscape painter. Indeed the painting is a decisive reminder of a particular work by Dupr�, Autumn (The Hague, Rijksmuseum Mesdag), which van Gogh had seen and noted at an exhibition in The Hague in 1882 and in imitation of which he had drawn a sketch of some old bog trunks at sunset in the autumn of 1883.