Season of mists and mellow artfulness

Vincent van Gogh painted it as olive trees buffeted by the wind, Claude Monet as frothing orange leaves, David Hockney as a triumph of woodland colours. Michael Prodger explores how autumn's many beauties have long inspired artists

- Michael Prodger

FOR Vincent van Gogh, autumn was the most beguiling and poetic of seasons. ‘As long as autumn lasts,’ he wrote, ‘I shall not have hands, canvas and colours enough to paint the beautiful things I see.’ Here was the chance to use a myriad of rich tones, to fill skies with the drama of clouds and lay down in paint the sense of change in the air.

Autumn was a subject van Gogh turned to again and again. Avenue of Poplars in Autumn (1884), Autumn Landscape with Four Trees (1885), Autumn Landscape at Dusk (1885), Les Alyscamps (1888) and Falling Autumn Leaves (1888)—the season had a hold on him. And in 1889, between October and December, at the asylum near Saint Rémy where he was recovering from the breakdown heralded by the self-mutilation of his ear, it hadn’t let go. There, he depicted olive trees buffeted by the wind and painted over a fizzing picture of a flowering hillside with an image of a grey and green ravine instead. His colours, still rich, had darkened and the mood, for all the tossing and turning brushstrokes, was sombre. There was a chill in the air. Van Gogh sensed, it seems, that he was painting the autumn of his own life. The following summer, he killed himself.

Van Gogh was far from the first artist to find something elegiac in the season. More than three centuries earlier, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted