This canvas, presumably "Le Cyprès" shown in the 1890 Salon des Indépendants in Paris, was painted in late June 1889, shortly after van Gogh began his year-long confinement at the asylum in Saint-Rémy (May 1889–May 1890). The motif, which he found "as beautiful of line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk," both captivated and challenged the artist: "It is 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 that I can imagine." Cypresses, along with Wheat Field with Cypresses (1993.132), was intended as part of a series of cypresses that would be the "contrast and yet the equivalent" of the sunflower paintings van Gogh had executed earlier in Arles.

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