When Vincent van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886, he encountered the radical new colors and brushwork of the Impressionist painters, and within a year, his own palette and style shifted dramatically. Trees on a slope, painted in 1887, stands as a vivid testament to this transformation: it is among the earliest works in which Van Gogh experimented with the broken brushstrokes and brighter tones he had seen in the studios of Monet and Pissarro. Unlike his somber Dutch canvases, this painting pulses with the restless energy that would soon define his mature style.

The work’s medium remains uncertain—a reminder of the many sketches and studies Van Gogh produced during this feverish Parisian period, often on whatever materials were at hand. A group of slender trees clings to a hillside, their trunks twisting upward, their leaves rendered in dabs of green, ochre, and blue. The angle of the slope and the cropping of the scene suggest a moment of movement, as if the viewer is pausing mid-walk on a rural path just outside Montmartre. Van Gogh’s brushwork is rapid, almost impatient, and the light seems to flicker across the surface, breaking up forms into flecks of color.

Unlike the formal, ordered landscapes of Corot, here nature is unruly and immediate, the trees bending as if shaped by the wind and the painter’s own urgent gaze. The scene tells no myth or legend, but it captures Van Gogh’s search for harmony in the everyday, his attempt to see the world anew through color. The precise provenance of Trees on a slope is uncertain, as is common with many of Van Gogh’s Paris works, which were often exchanged among friends or left behind in studios. It likely remained in private hands for decades before entering a public collection.

Today, it is valued not only as a landscape but as a document of Van Gogh’s Parisian metamorphosis—a brief, fertile interlude before his move to Arles and the creation of his most famous paintings. The painting’s loose handling and experimental color mark it as a key step in the artist’s journey, bridging the gap between the Dutch earth and the southern sun.