Van Gogh's fascination with the olive trees that grew in cultivated groves just outside the walls of the asylum at Saint-Rémy is reflected in a series of paintings he devoted to them, beginning with three made in June 1889 and five completed by late November 1889, including the present work. The autumn campaign was undertaken, in part, in reaction to the recent work of his friends Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, whose symbolic compositions of Christ in the Garden of Olives seemed shallow to him and without real artistic merit. "What I have done," wrote Van Gogh to his brother, Theo, "is a rather hard and coarse reality beside their abstractions, but it will have a rustic quality and will smell of the earth." Van Gogh painted the trees directly from nature in late 1889 in an effort to capture the "contrasting effects of the foliage, changing with the hues of the sky," and the canvases vary greatly in their rich play of color. Yet the group is distinctive for its stylistic unity: the artist deliberately suppressed his exuberant handling and thick impasto for a more refined approach, notable for its lively staccato application of paint and Seurat-like broken color harmonies.