People Walking in a Park

Until 1852 the Bois de Boulogne on the western edge of Paris was an old royal hunting forest. That year Napoleon III handed it to the city, and his engineers cut lakes, lawns and winding carriage drives into it, so that by the 1880s it was where fashionable Parisians went to walk and to be seen. Van Gogh painted this view in 1886, his first year in the city, on a canvas a little under half a metre wide. He keeps the walkers small and dark against the pale path, some in pairs, and on the left a woman in white with a small child. Above them the leaves have already turned orange and yellow, although the catalogues of his work date the canvas to the summer.