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The Mulberry Tree

Artist: Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)

Date: 1889

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, United States

Description

Van Gogh suffered from delicate mental and physical health throughout his life. In the spring of 1889, following a series of nervous breakdowns, he committed himself to an asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. There his work evolved away from the hallucinatory color of his Arles period toward the ever more vigorous brushwork and ever more liberally applied paint of his late manner. Here the flaming foliage of the mulberry tree, the rushing sky and hillside are so richly painted that the picture’s surface becomes a kind of bas-relief sculpture. Van Gogh was particularly pleased with this painting, remarking in letters to his siblings that he considered it his most successful treatment of its theme.

The Awesome & the Bad

The awesome part is that I can snack on mulberries when I go to my mailbox. The tree is right there.

The bad part is 👇

I can’t get to my mailbox without having to walk through a bunch of squashed berries that drop on the ground all over the place. 🤬

I pruned some branches off but I still get berry junk all over my shoes.

Grrr.

#mulberry tree #michigan #country #original photography

yeah i ate it and it was sweet and juicy and MADE OF GLORY

#trees #berries #mulberry #edible wild plants #mulberry tree #fruit trees #berry season #my photos

chipmunk and mulberry. Learning more. about what works and what doesn't, I think

#chipmunk #nature #postcard #collage #mixed media #watercolor #mulberry tree #art

Silk Routes: Southern Italy's Calabria, the Mediterranean, and the Making of a European Craft

In Calabria — and particularly in the Catanzaro area — the silk tradition is rooted in a long Mediterranean context in which the Byzantine period played a decisive role in the spread of crops such as the mulberry tree and in the transmission of artisanal knowledge related to spinning and weaving. This was not a linear or automatic continuity, but rather a slow process of sedimentation: practices, techniques, and forms of knowledge that crossed centuries and became established only when they encountered a territory, a power structure, and a demand capable of sustaining them.

It is in the early modern period that the silk craft in Catanzaro takes on a fully recognizable and institutional form. Under Charles V (1519), chapters and regulations were promoted to govern silk production; these rules were later brought together into organic compilations, among which the 1569 version is today considered a unique document.

The statutes established working rules, controls, and quality standards to protect the reputation of the products and the markets. Production involved a dense network of skilled workers, but also widespread domestic labor: looms present in homes, neighborhoods, and small workshops, in a system that combined household economy with guild-based organization.

On the French side, in the same long century in which Europe came to understand that silk was not only luxury but also power, the Kingdom of France sought to establish a national silk industry. With an ordinance issued in 1466, Louis XI promoted Lyon as a center for the production of gold and silk fabrics. From the outset, the birth of Lyon’s soierie was tied to a strong Italian presence: merchants, bankers, artisans, fairs, as well as imported mulberry trees and techniques. The process was not immediate; it proceeded through experiments, attempts, and transfers — including those that took place in Tours — before Lyon emerged as the great European center of silk production.

It is at this point of convergence that a fascinating trace emerges: French sources recall a figure known as “Jean le Calabrais,” associated with a loom (the métier à boutons) and with a decisive moment in the history of weaving machines between Tours and Lyon. Beyond the difficulty of reconstructing the artisan’s biography with precision, the persistence of this technical memory is meaningful: it suggests that Calabria was not only an exporter of raw material or finished textiles, but also a potential exporter of artisanal intelligence — of technical solutions and knowledge embodied in the tools themselves. In this sense, it is not only silk that migrates: technique migrates as well, carrying with it a fragment of the Mediterranean world.

Bibliography:

Statutes of the Silk Guild of Catanzaro (1569), Chamber of Commerce of Catanzaro (manuscript and heritage studies).

Sergi, Oreste. Restoring Memory: Textiles in Catanzaro from the 15th to the 20th Century (historical reconstruction, production chain, and institutions).

Studies in Southern Italian economic history on the silk industry and domestic labor (16th–18th centuries).

Toubert, Pierre. A Historiographical Myth: Italian Sericulture in the Early Middle Ages (9th–10th Centuries). Éditions de la Sorbonne.

Municipal Archives of Lyon, Ordinance of Louis XI (1466) concerning silk production.

Historical documentation from Lyon on the origins of the soierie (15th–16th centuries).

French technical-historical texts on weaving looms (the tradition of the métier à boutons and Jean le Calabrais).

Musée des Arts et Métiers, history of weaving machines (pre-Jacquard context).

#catanzaro #calabria #italy #italia #south italy #southern italy #history #silk #silk road #silk router #mediterranean #crafts #italian #europe #loom #weaving #mulberry #mulberry tree #textile