Garden with courting couples - Square Saint-Pierre

Van Gogh painted this in May 1887, and in his letters he called it simply the garden with lovers. Where that garden was is less settled than the title suggests. Older catalogues placed it in the Voyer d'Argenson park at Asnières, the riverside suburb north-west of Paris where he worked a great deal that spring. The Van Gogh Museum, which owns the painting, names it after the square Saint-Pierre at the foot of Montmartre, minutes from the flat he shared with his brother Theo. Either way it is an ordinary municipal park, the kind Parisians walked out to on a Sunday afternoon. At 75 by 113 centimetres this is among the largest canvases of his Paris years, and he gave most of that space to grass and trees, setting the three couples low in the picture with sky across the top half.