Hospital at Saint-Rémy

In the spring of 1889, Van Gogh checked himself into a hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He'd been through a string of breakdowns and needed somewhere safe. Hospital at Saint-Rémy shows a corner of the grounds there, and it's proof that even shut away, he couldn't stop looking for something to paint. Today is World Mental Health Day, which makes this painting worth sitting with a little longer than usual.

Tall pines take up most of the canvas, their limbs twisting and tangling across the top like a frame around the sky. Van Gogh paints them in his usual restless strokes, greens and yellows and browns flickering against blue that turns almost green as it drops toward the horizon. Down at the bottom, the ground is all burnt sienna and patches of bright grass. That same rust color shows up again on the hospital building in the distance, a paler cousin of the yellow roof from his house in Arles, which he'd painted just the year before.

P.S. Here's the story of four other artists who struggled with mental health.