O Sena com a ponte de Clichy

By the summer of 1887 Van Gogh had been living in Paris with his brother Theo for over a year, and the city had transformed his painting. The heavy browns he had brought from Holland were gone. Out along the Seine, where the river divides the suburbs of Clichy and Asnieres, he set up beside the water and painted in bright, separated touches he had picked up from younger friends like Paul Signac. The stone piers of the bridge break into ripples on the surface, and a woman in pink with a red parasol stands near the bank as the one warm accent. A year later he would carry all this south to Arles. Here the colour is still cool, tried out on a stretch of working-class riverside.