The Seine Bridge at Asnières

In the summer of 1887 Van Gogh was living with his brother Theo in a flat in Montmartre and walking out most weeks to Asnieres, a riverside suburb about an hour away on foot. It was an odd sort of place by then. Parisians came out on Sundays to row and to drink at the waterside cafes, while factories and the railway lines out of the Gare Saint-Lazare closed in on the same stretch of river.

He painted there with Emile Bernard, whose parents had a house in Asnieres with a garden studio, and he ran into Paul Signac on the bank. Those are the months when his colour broke open. He had arrived in Paris a year and a half earlier still painting Dutch browns and greys, and he left it in February 1888 for Arles.