Square Saint-Pierre at Sunset

When Van Gogh painted this small park in May 1887, he had been in Paris with his brother Theo for barely a year, and his colour was changing almost week by week. Two years earlier, in the Netherlands, he had painted peasants in browns and heavy greens. Here, in a new public garden at the foot of Montmartre called the Square Saint-Pierre, the low evening sun breaks the young trees into flecks of green, blue and reddish orange, with a few thin figures drifting beneath them. The touch is short and separate, picked up from the Impressionists and pointillists he was meeting around the city. It is a modest thing, painted on cardboard, and he never sold it. He left it in Theo's apartment when he went south to Arles the following year, and it hangs today in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.