Women Picking Olives

Description

Vincent van Gogh’s Women Picking Olives shows women working together among twisting olive trees. A ladder creates a firm diagonal at the center, while blue-green foliage and undulating ground carry the eye across the grove.

Curved strokes animate nearly every part of the landscape, from the trunks to the pale pink sky. The figures share that rhythm through their reaching arms and the exchange of a basket. Their small scale leaves the trees and surrounding earth prominent, presenting the harvest as part of the landscape’s larger pattern.