Fishing in Spring, the Pont de Clichy (Asnières)

In April 1887 Van Gogh began walking out to Asnières, a riverside suburb north-west of Paris where Sunday rowers and anglers shared the bank with gasworks and factories. Paul Signac, a painter ten years younger whose family lived there, described the routine. They worked along the waterfront, ate in a café, and walked back into Paris along the avenues of Saint-Ouen and Clichy. Over that spring and summer Van Gogh made around 30 paintings and drawings in those suburbs, of bridges, parks, restaurants and factory chimneys. This one looks at the Seine by the Pont de Clichy. The small separate strokes of pure colour come from what Signac and Georges Seurat were doing at the time, setting unmixed colours side by side so the surface holds more light. Van Gogh took up the idea and kept his strokes loose and visible, never tightening them into the even dots the other two were using.