Das Restaurant Rispal in Asnières

In the summer of 1887 Van Gogh kept walking out of Paris to Asnieres, a riverside suburb about two hours away on foot, where day-trippers came to eat and boat on the Seine. He went partly for the company. The younger painter Paul Signac was working there, laying pure colours side by side in small dots and dashes, and Van Gogh, only a year off his dark Dutch palette, was teaching himself the same bright method. You can see him trying it here, in the flecked blues and greens and the sunlit yellows of an ordinary eating-house. Two orange signs carry green lettering. One reads Restaurant Rispal, the other simply Vins, wine.