Exterior of a Restaurant in Asnières

From May 1887 Van Gogh spent about three months painting in Asnières and Clichy, riverside suburbs some six kilometres down the Seine from his flat in Montmartre. Trains ran out there and Sunday crowds came for the water, the boats and the cheap restaurants. He walked instead, roughly an hour each way. Paul Signac, whose family had a house in Asnières and who painted beside him that spring, remembered the routine plainly: they worked along the waterfront, ate in a café, then went back to Paris on foot along the avenues of Saint-Ouen and Clichy. This is one of the things he carried home. It is smaller than a sheet of writing paper, a terrace and its awning set down in the small separate strokes he had taken up that year.