Richard Kendall

“(p. 133) Van Gogh's need to create "a more exalting and consoling nature" is also expressed by his desire to combine his orchards into diptychs and triptychs, religiously charged forms of presentation that are inextricably tied to church interiors. Works of this kind were also familiar to Van Gogh from Japanese printmaking, in which two or three woodcuts often constitute a single scene -- he himself owned a number of such multiple-block prints, some with depictions of trees in blossom. The association with both religion and utopian Japan lends idealistic overtones to Van Gogh's idea to present his own work in this way.”
― Richard Kendall, Van Gogh and Nature

“(p. 32) In the early 1880s, Van Gogh wrestled with religion (and with his father as its representative), and the demolition of Nuenen's old church tower symbolized this struggle. Van Gogh regarded the demolition as the destruction of the church as an institution, but not of faith as such. Faith, asserted Van Gogh, could manage perfectly well without the institution: "And now this ruin says to me how a faith and religion moldered away, although it was solidly founded — how, though, the life and death of the peasants is and always will be the same, springing up and withering regularly like the grass and the flowers that grow there in that churchyard.... Religions pass, God remains" [507].”
― Richard Kendall, Van Gogh and Nature