Focus on this artwork and discuss the The garden.
One year before coming to Saint-Rémy Van Gogh wrote of a visit to an old garden, which shed light both on his interest in gardens and connection to their restorative effect: "If it had been bigger it would have made me think of Zola’s Paradou, great reeds, vines, ivy, fig trees, olive trees, pomegranates with lusty flowers of the brightest orange, hundred-year-old cypresses, ash trees and willows, rock oaks, half-demolished flights of steps, ogive windows in ruins, blocks of white rock covered in lichen and scattered fragments of collapsed walls here and there among the greenery." Van Gogh gave reference to Émile Zola’s La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, an 1875 novel about a monk who finds solace in an overgrown garden where he is nursed back to health by a young woman.For the first month of Van Gogh's stay he could not leave the grounds of the hospital, so he looked to the garden where he painted flowers and trees. To his brother, Theo, he wrote, "When you receive the canvases that I have done in the garden, you will see that I am not too melancholy here."In the first week in October Van Gogh made several paintings, such as The Mulberry Tree, The Reaper, and Entrance to a Quarry. He also made a painting of trees in the courtyard that he seemed proud of; he wrote, "I have two views of the gardens and the asylum in which this place looks very attractive. I’ve tried to reconstruct it as it might have been, simplifying and accentuating the proud, unchanging nature of the pine trees and the clumps of cedar against the blue."			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
Van Gogh also made Flowering Rosebushes in the Asylum Garden also called Flowering Shrub that resides at Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands (F1527).
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret Theo interest Otterlo Saint-Rémy Kröller-Müller Museum Émile Zola asylum Zola Netherlands