The Banks of the Seine with Boats

In the spring of 1887 Van Gogh walked out of his brother's flat in Montmartre down to the Seine at Asnieres, about an hour on foot through Clichy, and painted the river over and over. The suburb was a mixed place: rowing clubs and riverside restaurants on one bank, gasworks and factories spreading along the other. He had company. Paul Signac, ten years younger, painted beside him and pushed him towards brighter, separated strokes, and Emile Bernard's family had a wooden studio in their garden at Asnieres where Van Gogh sometimes worked. He came back to this stretch of water through that spring and summer in about a dozen canvases, most of them pale blue water under short, unblended touches of colour.