Restaurant de la Sirène at Asnières, The

In 1887 Asnières was where Parisians went on a Sunday: a riverside suburb just northwest of the city, with boating on the Seine and cheap restaurants for the day-trippers. The Sirène was one of them, and Van Gogh painted it twice that year. The version in the Musée d'Orsay stands close to the façade. This one keeps its distance, looking at the building across a stretch of rough grass, and the whole field is laid down in short, straw-like strokes of yellow and green. After Van Gogh's death the canvas travelled. It was with a Paris owner by 1901, in the collection of the Danish collector Christian Tetzen-Lund in Copenhagen by 1921, and then passed through dealers in Berlin to the Alport family by 1929. Dr Erich Alport, who had settled in Oxford, left it to the Ashmolean in 1972.