He was initially confined to the immediate asylum grounds and painted (without the window bars) the world he saw from his room, such as ivy covered trees, lilacs, and irises in the garden.

[2][5] As he ventured outside of the asylum walls, he painted the wheat fields, olive groves, and cypress trees in the surrounding countryside,[5] which he saw as "characteristic of Provence."

[2] The imposed regimen of asylum life gave van Gogh a hard-won stability: "I feel happier here with my work than I could be outside.

"[5] While his time at Saint-Rémy forced him to manage his vices, such as coffee, alcohol, poor eating habits and periodic attempts to consume turpentine and paint, his stay was not ideal.

[6] By early 1890, when the attacks worsened, he concluded that his stay at the asylum was not helping him to recover, which led him to move to Auvers-sur-Oise just north of Paris in May 1890.

Then, as the bronzer foliage takes on more mature tones, the sky is radiant and streaked with green and orange, and then again, further into autumn, the leaves take on violet tones something of the color of a ripe fig, and this violet effect manifests itself most fully with the contrast of the large, whitening sun within its pale halo of light lemon.

They are old silver, sometimes with more blue in them, sometimes greenish, bronzed, fading white above a soil which is yellow, pink, violet tinted orange... very difficult."

[12] Van Gogh painted nature, the major subject for his works in the last 29 months of his life, to bring relief from his illnesses and emotional distress.

[15] It was among the blossoming trees, the olive orchards and fields that van Gogh most often found "profound meaning", because he saw in their cycles an analogy to human life.

He wrote to Theo that death, happiness and unhappiness are "necessary and useful" and relative, declaring "Even faced with an illness that breaks me up and frightens me, that belief is unshaken.

"[7] The autumn work was somewhat in reaction to the recent compositions of Christ in the Garden of Olives by his friends Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard.

[18] Frustrated by their work which he qualified with the words "nothing was observed", Van Gogh painted "in the groves, morning and evening during these clear, cold days, but in beautiful, bright sunshine" resulting in five canvases above the three he completed earlier in the year.

[21] In Paris, he met leading French artists Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat and others who provided illuminating influences on the use of color and technique.

In both The Starry Night and his olive tree paintings, van Gogh used the intense blue of the sky to symbolize the "divine and infinite presence" of Jesus.

[18] The National Gallery of Art summarizes this series: In the olive trees — in the expressive power of their ancient and gnarled forms — van Gogh found a manifestation of the spiritual force he believed resided in all of nature.

His brushstrokes make the soil and even the sky seem alive with the same rustling motion as the leaves, stirred to a shimmer by the Mediterranean wind.

[29] Within the painting, twisted green olive trees stand before the foothills of the Alps and underneath the sky with an "ectoplasmic" cloud.

Later, when the pictures had dried, he sent both of them to Theo in Paris, noting: "The olive trees with the white cloud and the mountains behind, as well as the rise of the moon and the night effect, are exaggerations from the point of view of the general arrangement; the outlines are accentuated as in some old woodcuts.

[30] The third, in the Chester Dale collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (F656)[9] he painted in his studio in December in a "very discreet color scheme".

The autumn toned painting met van Gogh's goal of achieving a "harsh and coarse" realism to his work.

[19][37] The intense nature of National Gallery of Scotland's Olive Trees (F714) likely expresses Van Gogh's agitated state of mind when he completed this work, dramatic impact evidenced both through his brushstrokes and color use.