Letter 06/25/1889 - by Vincent van Gogh

We've had some fine, warm days, and I've started work on some more paintings, so that now twelve of the thirty canvases are under way. Two studies of cypresses in that difficult shade of bottle green - I've worked the foregrounds in white lead impasto, which brings a firmness to the land.

There's no news to write about, as every day is the same; the only ideas I have are thinking that a wheat field or a cypress tree is really worth looking at closely, and that sort of thing.

I have a wheat field that is very yellow and very bright, perhaps the brightest canvas I have done.

The cypresses continue to occupy my thoughts; I'd like to do something with them like the paintings of the sunflowers, because I'm amazed that they haven't yet been done in the way that I see them. They have a beauty of line and proportion like that of an Egyptian obelisk.

And the quality of the green is so distinguished.

It's the splash of black in a sunny landscape, but one of the most interesting black notes and one of the most difficult to capture precisely that I can imagine.

You have to see them here against the blue, in the blue, I should say. To paint nature here, as anywhere, you have to spend a lot of time in it.

I think that of the two canvases of cypresses, the one I've done a sketch of here will be the best. The trees are very tall and solid. The foreground very low with brambles and brushwood. Behind, some violet hills, a green and pink sky with a crescent moon. The foreground in particular is in thick impasto - clumps of brambles with touches of yellow, violet, and green.