The Bridge at Courbevoie

The Bridge at Courbevoie, at the Van Gogh Museum, depicts the iron road bridge over the Seine that Van Gogh and Émile Bernard both painted during their shared summer of 1887 at Asnières — one of the most documented instances of two artists working the same subject at the same moment. Van Gogh met Bernard at Cormon's atelier and developed an important artistic friendship with him during the Paris period; their joint painting sessions at Asnières in the summer of 1887, where Seurat's Grande Jatte subjects had been explored three years earlier, represent a specific moment of Post-Impressionist experimentation. He was simultaneously absorbing Seurat's divisionist system through his friendship with Signac, and the Courbevoie bridge canvases show the direct application of Neo-Impressionist technique to a Parisian suburban subject that Seurat had himself explored. Van Gogh never adopted divisionism systematically, but these bridge studies are his closest approach to its principles.

Short comma-like strokes in a range of blues, greens, and whites build the water and sky in a clearly divisionist manner. The iron bridge structure is rendered in flat grey-blue silhouette. The light and air quality is notably lighter and more atmospheric than any earlier Van Gogh, reflecting the Parisian colour revolution of 1887.