[Vincent Van Gogh]

Olive trees, in the expressive power of their ancient and gnarled forms, have influenced many painters through the centuries. According to Huxley, the olive is the painter's tree. 

At the north entrance to the Palace of Knossos in Crete, Greece, there is a relief depicting the sacred bull charging an olive tree, which dates from the middle Minoan period between 2100 and 1600 B.C. From Knossos also comes a miniature fresco (1600 B.C.) representing an outdoor religious celebration with people dancing in an olive grove. 

Renoir, who himself owned an olive grove, wrote about the olive tree: "Look at the light on the olives. It sparkles like diamonds. It is pink, it is blue, and the sky that plays across them is enough to drive you mad."

During the last seven months of 1889, Van Gogh painted at least fifteen scenes of olive trees. He wrote to his brother, Theo, that he was "struggling to catch [the olive trees]. They are old silver, sometimes with more blue in them, sometimes greenish, bronzed, fading white above a soil which is yellow, pink, violet tinted orange… very difficult." 

Van Gogh found that the "rustle of the olive grove has something very secret in it, and immensely old." In the olive trees, he found a manifestation of the spiritual force he believed resided in all of nature. 

The energy in the continuous rhythm of his brushstrokes communicates in an almost physical way the living force that Van Gogh found within the trees themselves.