Undergrowth

Van Gogh painted this patch of forest floor in the summer of 1887, a little over a year after he moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo. The dark browns of his Dutch peasant pictures were gone. In Paris he had watched the Impressionists and the younger painters break colour into separate touches, and here he tries it on a tangle of trees and undergrowth, laying down green, blue and pink in short strokes so the light seems to flicker between the trunks. There is no horizon and no sky, just the close, shaded ground. The French had a word for this kind of view, sous-bois, the underwood scene the Barbizon painters had made popular a generation before him. He would return to it again and again in his last years at Saint-Remy and Auvers. This small Paris canvas is among his very first tries.