"Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that's the real way to learn to understand art better and better.
Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see"
- Vincent van Gogh's letter to his brother Theo, 1874.
Vincent van Gogh | Mountains at Saint-Rémy, 1889 | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
During the years preceding his suicide in 1890, Vincent van Gogh suffered increasingly frequent attacks of mental distress, the cause of which remains unclear.
"Mountains at Saint-Rémy" was painted in July 1889, when Van Gogh was recovering from just such an episode at the hospital of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in the southern French town of Saint-Rémy.