The Seine, Morning (Saint-Ouen)

Saint-Ouen in 1886 was a working suburb on the Seine just outside Paris. Gasworks, coal wharves and factories were going up along the banks, and Parisians still came out to the same water to row and to swim. Angrand painted it early in the day, and he gave almost the whole canvas to the river, leaving only a thin strip of the far bank in the distance. That is an unusual way to build a landscape this small, 46 centimetres by 55. The following year Van Gogh was working the neighbouring reaches of the same river at Asnières and Clichy, and the two men knew each other in Paris then. The Van Gogh Museum bought the painting in 2012 with support from a Dutch charity lottery, and in 2023 hung it in its own exhibition about Van Gogh and the Seine.