River Bank in Springtime

The suburban riverbank at Asnières gave Van Gogh one of his most productive motifs during the spring and summer of 1887, when he was painting alongside Paul Signac and absorbing the technical innovations of Neo-Impressionism. River Bank in Springtime, now at the Dallas Museum of Art, captures the specific quality of the Seine's northern tributaries in April or May — the fresh green of new vegetation, the pale silvery light characteristic of the Île-de-France spring, the specific reflections of bare-branching and newly leafing trees on still water. Van Gogh was testing here whether the Divisionist touch could be applied to a traditional Impressionist subject with more expressive force than Impressionism's atmospheric dissolve allowed. He admired Pissarro's riverbank paintings intensely — their careful attention to specific seasons and times of day — but found Pissarro's palette insufficiently intense for what he wanted to express. The Dallas Museum of Art's acquisition places this within a distinguished American museum whose French Impressionist holdings span the movement's full history, from Monet's early riverscapes to Van Gogh's more charged treatments of related subjects.

The riverbank in spring is rendered with Van Gogh's developing Impressionist palette — high-keyed greens and blues, the fresh colors of new vegetation. His brushwork on the riverside vegetation is broken and energetic, following the Impressionist approach to foliage. Water reflections are painted with loose, directional strokes that capture the river's surface.