The Bois de Boulogne with People Walking

The year before he painted this, Van Gogh was working in the dim browns of the Dutch countryside, turning out peasants and potato eaters. Then, in March 1886, he moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo, and the city rearranged his eye. Here he is in the Bois de Boulogne, the large park on the western edge of Paris, watching well-dressed people stroll under the trees. The palette has lifted toward the lighter, broken colour he was seeing in the Impressionists around him, among them Pissarro and Seurat. It is an ordinary afternoon, the kind of subject a Parisian painter might choose without a second thought. Van Gogh had been in the city only a few months, and it was already changing how he painted.