The cycle of life, death, and rebirth shown through the seasons is represented best in three of van Gogh’s works painted while in Arles: Orchard with Blossoming Plum Trees (1888), Snowy Landscape near Arles (1888), and Sower with Setting Sun (1888).
Life
Orchard with Blossoming Plum Trees is a landscape filled with a green hue, with everything from the grass to the buds and leaves on the trees showing vibrant liveliness. Even the trunks of the trees are green, perhaps to signify that even though the bark on the surface is dead, the tree within is flourishing. More importantly, this particular painting has a shocking resemblance to van Gogh’s previously mentioned Plum Tree in Bloom. The repeated occurrences of the plum trees throughout the field take after the japonaiserie and stress the beauty of nature that is not present in the city. Van Gogh’s painting succeeds in representing the beauty of the living portion of the samsara cycle in the springtime.
Death
In contrast, Snowy Landscape near Arles takes place during the season of death. The whole field is frozen over with a layer of snow, and only a few ferns in the forefront survive the cold. Both the snow and the sky are lifeless, and the sun, the universal source of life, is purposely left out. Sunlight is also removed from the painting, and whatever dull light is present seems to be coming more from the snow than from the clouds above. The human structures in the far back and the footprints all over the snow field suggest that van Gogh would relate human structures to something as morbid as death itself, while he associates the natural trees in Orchard with Blossoming Plum Trees with birth. This confirms that van Gogh’s purpose in moving to Arles was to keep his distance from people and to live surrounded by nature’s landscapes he so appreciates.
Rebirth
Sower with Setting Sun symbolizes rebirth, the third stage of the samsara, with the sower spreading seeds over the soil. In contrast to Snowy Landscape near Arles, the gigantic sun is in the background, shining an intense yellow over the fields of wheat, also in the farther end of the painting. Meanwhile, the shadowy blue soil of the foreground awaits the sower for rebirth, but the crows, colored in deathly black, swoop in the take away the seeds of life from the soil. In essence, while not taking place in the springtime again, this painting contains the transition between life and death by dividing and juxtaposing the fruitful background against the darker, more barren foreground. In Van Gogh and God, Zen Master Dogen expresses his deep feelings for the cycle of four seasons: “Life is a stage of time, and death is a stage of time, like, for example, winter and spring” (qtd. Edwards 108). Dogen studied the seasons of the year as an important cycle of nature, and similarly van Gogh, like a Buddhist monk himself, studied the seasons and the samsara by painting the landscapes of Arles over the course of a single year.