Now I’ll tell you that I’m working on the 2 paintings of which I wanted to make repetitions. The pink peach tree is giving me the most trouble.
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ResetI’m in a fury of work as the trees are in blossom and I wanted to do a Provence orchard of tremendous gaiety.
I’ve just done a clump of apricot trees in a little fresh green orchard.
I remain enraptured with the scenery here, am working at a series of blooming orchards.
Today has been a good day too. This morning I worked on an orchard of plum trees in blossom — suddenly a tremendous wind began to blow, an effect I’d only ever seen here — and came back again at intervals. In the intervals, sunshine that made all the little white flowers sparkle. It was so beautiful!
The weather’s changeable, often windy and cloudy skies — but the almond trees are starting to blossom everywhere.
I’ve scraped off one of the large painted studies. A Garden of Olives—with a blue and orange Christ figure, a yellow angel—a piece of red earth, green and blue hills. Olive trees with purple and crimson trunks, with grey green and blue foliage. Sky lemon yellow. I scraped it off because I tell myself it’s wrong to do figures of that importance without a model.
If you could see the olive trees at this time of year... The old-silver and silver foliage greening up against the blue. And the orangeish ploughed soil. It’s something very different from what one thinks of it in the north – it’s a thing of such delicacy – so refined. It’s like the lopped willows of our Dutch meadows or the oak bushes of our dunes, that’s to say the murmur of an olive grove has something very intimate, immensely old about it. It’s too beautiful for me to dare paint it or be able to form an idea of it. The oleander – ah – it speaks of love and it’s as beautiful as Puvis de Chavannes’ Lesbos, where there were women beside the sea. But the olive tree is something else, it is, if you want to compare it to something, like Delacroix.
I’m well these days, apart from a certain vague background sadness that’s hard to define — but anyway — I’ve gained physical powers rather than lose them, and I’m working. Just now I have on the easel an orchard of peach trees beside a road with the Alpilles in the background.
I’d worked on a no. 20 canvas in the open air in an orchard — ploughed lilac field, a reed fence — two pink peach trees against a glorious blue and white sky. Probably the best landscape I’ve done.
There’s a hard frost here, and out in the country there’s still snow—I have a study of a whitened landscape with the town in the background. And then 2 little studies of a branch of an almond tree that’s already in flower despite everything.
