National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

Van Gogh’s extraordinary and tragic life, his feelings and thoughts revealed in prolific correspondence, often overwrites the material reality of his paintings. He was a pioneer of modern art, using the genres of landscape, portraiture and still life to experiment with form and colour. Here, in an extraordinary close-up rendition of urban nature, Tree trunks in the grass, Van Gogh reinvigorates the landscape format by looking down into it instead of outwards, and thus eliminates both horizon and sky. He wrote about the painting in a letter to his brother Theo in early May 1890, in which he also details a planned journey from the asylum at Saint-Rémy to the care of Dr Gachet at Auvers-sur-Oise: … my work is going well, I have done two canvases of the fresh grass in the park, one of which is extremely simple, here is a hasty sketch of it. The trunk of a pine violet-pink and then the grass with white flowers and dandelions, a little rose tree and other tree trunks in the background right at the top of the canv