Path in the Woods

Path in the Woods, at the Van Gogh Museum and dated to 1887, belongs to a group of forest interior paintings Van Gogh made in the parks and woods accessible from Paris during his residence in the city. He had been deeply influenced by the Barbizon forest paintings of Diaz de la Peña and Corot — specifically the latter's luminous forest interiors where pale trunks caught the light filtering through canopies — and his Paris woodland subjects represent his effort to absorb this tradition while working in the lighter, more chromatic palette he was developing. The forest path was also a compositional formula he used in both his Dutch and Paris work: the lane or path receding between trees, drawing the viewer's eye into depth while the flanking trunks created a rhythmic framework. In the Paris version, this structure is maintained but animated by a lighter, more atmospheric handling. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Tree trunks provide vertical rhythms against a broken-colour ground. Filtered light through the canopy is rendered with varied touches of yellow-green and pale cream. The path leads the eye into depth with naturalistic spatial recession maintained despite the overall surface animation of the brushwork.