Park at Asnieres in Spring

In the spring of 1887 Van Gogh kept going out to Asnières, a suburb on the Seine just past the Paris fortifications, a short train ride or a long walk from the flat he shared with his brother in Montmartre. Parisians came there on Sundays to row and to eat by the water, and factories were rising along the same bank. Émile Bernard, a painter 15 years younger whom he had met in Paris, lived there with his parents and worked in a wooden shed in their garden, which gave Vincent somewhere to leave his things. His colour shifted over those weeks. The dark browns of his Dutch years gave way to the lighter, broken touches he had been studying in the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist pictures around him. He painted the park at Asnières more than once that spring. This canvas, 50 by 65 centimetres, is one of them, and it has stayed in private hands rather than going to a museum. That November he hung work from these months in a restaurant on the Boulevard de Clichy, together with Bernard and the painter Louis Anquetin.