Square Saint-Pierre, Paris

Square Saint-Pierre (1887), at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, depicts one of the Paris squares that Van Gogh observed during his residence in Montmartre — the urban social spaces he engaged alongside the more private café interiors and flower still lifes of his Paris period. He was living at the heart of the most artistically charged neighbourhood in the world and making systematic paintings of its different spatial types: the hilltop views, the garden paths, the backstreets, and now the public square. The Yale University Art Gallery holds this as part of a collection assembled partly through the Société Anonyme — Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp's organisation that championed European avant-garde art in America in the early twentieth century — making Van Gogh's Paris square an unexpected connection between the late-nineteenth-century European avant-garde and American modernism.

The urban scene is rendered with Van Gogh's evolving Parisian palette — lighter and more chromatic than his Dutch period — capturing the specific quality of Paris street light. Figures, trees, and buildings are organized within the composition with the observational freshness of direct outdoor observation. Brushwork is varied and direct throughout.