This longing that van Gogh felt for personal faith while finding the Church distant and ineffective is felt even more acutely in the figure-tower relationship in Winter Garden. Drawn only a few months later than Churchyard in Winter, in March of 1884, van Gogh intensifies this religious paradox by incorporating a sizeable distance between the figure and the church building. Situated off on the horizon, the church’s iconic steeple remains the only vertical in the far background, framed and highlighted by an opening in the contorted branches of the foreground’s gnarled trees. Gazing towards this faraway emblem is a lone figure, completely 
shrouded in black and lurking between the twisted trees of the garden. Van Gogh echoes the jarring angles of these branches with the twisted path upon which the figure stands, suggesting a yearning to move to the Church while recognizing the difficulty and ultimate impossibility of such a quest. In fact, there is again a wall between the figure and the tower in the distance, creating a dark horizontal barrier at the end of the garden. In her analysis of this drawing, Sjraar van Heugten notes the torture and agony van Gogh depicts through the lonely, dark figure and twisted trees, yet she completely fails to notice the religious yearning suggested by the tower’s position as a distant focal point (van Heugten 80-6). In fact, the dead plants of the garden in the winter, the black darkness engulfing the figure, the distorted trees and path and the overall sorrow of the work give visual aid to van Gogh’s written opinion of the misguided people of the organized Church (from a letter to Theo in late 1883): “I think they are more unhappy than I. Why do I think them unhappy? – because the good within them is wrongly applied, so that it acts like evil – because the light within them is black and spreads darkness, obscurity around them” (L345.1). In Vincent’s mind, as this passage illustrates, the people in the church are filled with the same confusion and darkness of his drawing, and are trapped on the twisted path leading to a fallen edifice. Even so, van Gogh continues to yearn for a better and more consoling God at the same time he looks down on this Church, his figure gazing down the path in hopes of a more alive religion all the same.