In 1888 Vincent van Gogh moved into the Yellow House. Many of his most famous masterpieces come from his short time in Arles.  Vincent had a long-held fascination with trees: trees in delicate bloom, silvery colored olive, heavily weighted yews to the thick sinewy, serpentine cypress. Slowly through drawings and paintings the cypress took to the forefront. Many paintings we most admirer feature the stately, looming obelisk-configured cypress, a few:  The Starry Night, The Harvest, The Cypresses and Cypresses with Two Female Figures.

“We have had some glorious days….two studies of cypresses of that difficult bottle-green hue…the cypresses are always occupying my thoughts, I should like to make something of them like the canvases of the sunflowers…It is as beautiful of line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk. And the green has a quality of such distinction.  It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes and the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine.  But then you must see them against the blue, in the blue rather. To paint nature here, as everywhere, you must be in it a long time…”

                                                                                                                Letter to Theo van Gogh, June 25, 1889

A writer of prodigious strength, depth, insight and practicality, he left a treasure of knowledge available to posterity.  Vincent’s letters were filled with descriptions and sketches of everything that caught his attention. A singular example would be his fascination for the cypress tree.

“Yesterday evening an extraordinarily beautiful sunset of a mysterious, sickly citron color—Prussian blue cypresses against trees with dead leaves in all sorts of broken tones without any speckling with bright greens.”  “The moon has risen, there are stars in the sky, a cypress looms above them.” “….blackened, shooting up their nightmarish silhouettes of flames.” 

Cypress trees have a utilitarian function in the Midi, they protect orchards from the devastating turbulence of the mistral. Cypress trees figured prominently in ancient Roman cemeteries, providing a symbolic representation of death. Death combined with gnarling roots giving rise to regeneration/rebirth. Perhaps van Gogh projected through his powerful cypress paintings, a wistful hope for immortality.

Vincent’s Road with Cypress and Star provides an evocation of the night’s cosmic powers. It was his last painting of the cypress. He wrote to Theo, “… very tall cypress, very straight, very somber, without radiance, the slender crescent barely emerging from the opaque shadows, set against an ultramarine sky.”  The whirling tips of the cypress repeat the rhythms of the swirling night sky.  And yet the cypress’ soaring vertical strength expresses an uplifting spirituality.

Over his short life time, the staunch religion of his father slowly evolved into a transformational belief in the religion of art.