Restaurant de la Sirène à Asnières

Van Gogh painted the Restaurant de la Sirène at Asnières during the summer of 1887, when he and Émile Bernard were making regular painting excursions from Paris to this working-class Seine suburb. The painting marks a decisive moment in his chromatic development: where his earlier Paris works were still cautiously lightening from the Dutch dark palette, this restaurant facade deploys the full Impressionist colour vocabulary — pure complementary contrasts, shadows rendered in blue rather than grey, the facade's colours as statements of chromatic relationship rather than documentary description. He was absorbing these lessons directly from Signac and Pissarro, but the Restaurant de la Sirène shows him applying them with a confidence and expressiveness that already exceeded his sources. Asnières was also a subject Seurat had made canonical with his Bathers, and Van Gogh's painted restaurant facade engages that same ordinary suburban location with a different social sympathy. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Short, comma-like Impressionist strokes of high-key colour build the facade and foliage. The complementary opposition of red and green is used throughout the composition. Shadows are rendered in blue rather than grey, demonstrating Van Gogh's full absorption of Impressionist colour theory.