Restaurant de la Sirène at Asnières

Catalogue numbers: F 313, JH 1251.

This picture shows an inviting restaurant in Asnières. Van Gogh's unique facility for communicating his feelings directly by means of his brushwork is already in evidence. The light and the associated atmospheric effects have become the actual subject of the picture, very much in the spirit of the Impressionists. Although still restrained, the painting is defined in terms of colour by contrasting complementary colours: blue and orange, red and green.

By the middle of 1887 a dramatic change of style has occurred in van Gogh's work. Using these characteristically 'impressionist' motifs of a restaurant on the outskirts of Paris, van Gogh seems to have been willing to experiment with Impressionist techniques as well. However, the painting lacks a sense of substance and conviction, which reflects his difficulty in feeling himself as part of the world he is portraying.

In the two years van Gogh spent in Paris he tried to assimilate French Impressionism, only to find that a new generation of painters were questioning its premises regarding both subject-matter and style. His flirtation with Impressionist subject-matter was brief; encounters with the Neo-Impressionists led him to believe that Paris could no longer be the subject of modern French painting.