Platz Saint-Pierre, Paris

Van Gogh painted this in 1887, during the two years he spent in Paris living with his brother Theo, and you can watch him changing on the canvas. He had come from the Netherlands with a palette of browns. Here the colour has opened into bright greens and dabbed, broken strokes, the lessons of the Impressionists and the young pointillists he was meeting around the city. The square lies at the foot of Montmartre. Just above it, out of frame, the great white basilica of Sacré-Cœur was going up, still a building site in 1887 and not finished for decades. He would leave Paris the next winter for the stronger light of the south.