Path in the Woods

French painters had been going into the woods for most of the century to paint the forest floor rather than a view. They called such pictures sous-bois, undergrowth. The format is fixed by the subject: an upright canvas, the trunks cut off at the top, almost no sky, the eye held close among the leaves. Corot and the Barbizon painters made a speciality of it, and the Impressionists carried it on.

Van Gogh painted a small group of these in Paris in the summer of 1887, this one in June, on a canvas of roughly 45 by 38 centimetres. That spring he had been out along the Seine at Asnières with Paul Signac, a younger painter who worked in separate dabs of colour, and his own greens that season came apart into short separate touches.