River Bank in Springtime

Van Gogh spent the spring of 1887 walking out of Paris to paint. He was living with his brother Theo in Montmartre, and the Seine at Asnieres and Clichy was within reach on foot, a stretch of boathouses, factories and Sunday rowing that Signac and Emile Bernard were working in as well. He was 34, had been in the city a year, and was pulling apart the impressionist and pointillist handling he had found there, trying the short separated strokes without committing to the system behind them. Around the edges of this canvas there are traces of red. He had framed it with a painted red border, and he did the same to two other landscapes of the same size, which is why they are thought to have been made to hang together.