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Avenue of Pollard Birches and Poplars
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890)
March 1884
- Medium
- Reed pen and iron-gall ink on tan laid paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 19.2 × 26.5 cm (7 9/16 × 10 7/16 in.)
- Culture
- Netherlands
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Richard and Mary L. Gray
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Vincent van Gogh seems to have been inspired to make this melancholy drawing after reading the poem “Tristement” (sadly) by the French writer François Coppee, who was known as the “poet of the humble.” The poem describes a mourning widow proceeding along “a very long lane of giant, halfdenuded plane trees.”
Time has enhanced the drawing’s autumnal mood. The iron-gall ink that Van Gogh used, once black, has altered to a dark brown and imparted a golden tone to the paper, the pen lines bleeding so that close hatchings merge and the contrast between light and dark is now muted.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
