巴黎郊外

Van Gogh painted this in 1887, while he was living in Paris with his brother Theo and walking out past the edge of the city on his free days. The Paris he found there was spreading. New factories and cheap housing were pushing into fields where people still cut hay and worked small plots, and he kept painting that seam where the city ate into the countryside. His palette had just brightened too, loosened by the Impressionist pictures he was seeing all over Paris, so the scruffy suburban ground comes in flecks of clear colour. He had grown up worrying about the same thing in the Dutch countryside, the old rural life giving way.