Tree Roots

Vincent van Gogh

Oil on canvas

Van Gogh Museum

Tree Roots is an oil painting executed by Vincent van Gogh in July 1890 during the final weeks of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. The wide, horizontal double-square canvas depicts a tangled mass of tree trunks, roots, and vegetation rendered in vibrant blues, greens, and yellows, which at first appear as near-abstract forms before resolving into a woodland slope. Painted with thick, impassioned impasto brushwork characteristic of van Gogh's mature Post-Impressionist style, the composition fills the entire picture plane with densely interlocking organic forms and no horizon line. Widely considered to be van Gogh's last painting, it is now held in the permanent collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and is regarded by scholars as a remarkable harbinger of abstraction in Western art.