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4.

There was a large book on him in the guest bedroom, and because I was unable to sleep on my first night, I read several chapters, eventually falling asleep with the volume open on my lap as a trace of dawn-red appeared in the corner of the window.

I awoke late and found that my hosts had gone to Saint-Rémy leaving a note to say that they would be back around lunchtime. Breakfast was laid out on a metal table on the terrace, and I ate three pains au chocolat'm guilty, rapid succession, all the while keeping one eye out for the housekeeper, who I feared might put an unflattering spin on my gourmandise for her employers.

It was a clear day with a mistral blowing that ruffled the heads of the wheat in an adjacent field. I had sat in this same spot the day before, but only now did I notice that there were two large cypresses growing at the end of the garden, a discovery that was not unconnected to the chapter I had read the night before on van Gogh's treatment of the tree. He had sketched a series of cypresses in 1888 and 1889. ‘They are constantly occupying my thoughts,' he told his brother. ‘It astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them. The cypress is as beautiful in 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 get exactly right.'

What did van Gogh notice about cypresses that others had failed to see? In part, the way they moved in the wind. I walked to the end of the garden and there studied, thanks to certain works (Cypresses and Wheat Field with Cypresses of 1889 in particular), their distinctive behaviour in the mistral.

Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses, 1889

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889

There are architectural reasons for this movement. Unlike pine branches, which descend gently downwards from the top of their tree, the fronds of the cypress thrust upwards from the ground. The cypress's trunk is, moreover, unusually short, with the top third of the tree being made up wholly of branches. Whereas an oak will shake its branches but keep its trunk immobile in the wind, the cypress will bend, and furthermore, because of the way the fronds grow from a number of points along the circumference of the trunk, it will seem to bend along different axes. From a distance, the lack of synchronicity in its movements makes it look as though the cypress were being shifted by several gusts of wind blowing from different angles. With its conelike shape (cypresses rarely exceed a metre in diameter), the tree takes on the appearance of a flame flickering nervously in the wind. All of this van Gogh noticed and would make others see.

A few years after van Gogh's stay in Provence, Oscar Wilde remarked that there had been no fog in London before Whistler painted it. Surely, too, there were fewer cypresses in Provence before van Gogh painted them.

Olive trees must also have been less noticeable. I had the previous day dismissed one example as a squat, bushlike thing, but in Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun and Olive Grove: Orange Sky of 1889, van Gogh brought out (that is, foregrounded) the shape of the olives' trunks and leaves.

I now noted an angularity that I had earlier missed: the trees resemble tridents that have been flung from a great height into the soil. There is a ferocity to the olive trees' branches, too, as if they were flexed arms ready to hit out. And whereas the leaves of many other trees make one think of limp lettuce emptied over racks of naked branches, the taut, silvery olive leaves give an impression of alertness and contained energy.

After van Gogh, I began to notice that there was something unusual about the colours of Provence as well. There are climatic reasons for this. The mistral, blowing along the Rhone Valley from the Alps, regularly clears the sky of clouds and moisture, leaving it a pure, rich blue without a trace of white. At the same