Bank of the Seine

By 1887 Van Gogh had been in Paris almost two years, sharing his brother Theo's apartment up in Montmartre. Nearly every day that summer he walked out to Asnières, a suburb along the Seine, with his paints on his back, and in a few months he made about 40 canvases there. The city had changed his eye. He had fallen in with the younger painters, tried the dots of Pointillism, and watched his old dark, earthy Dutch palette turn bright. On this riverbank you can see him working it out, long strokes laid down for the moving water and small flecks for the leaves. A year later he took that brighter light south to Arles.