The restaurant Rispal in Asnieres

Van Gogh painted the Restaurant Rispal in Asnières during the spring and summer of 1887, when he was working extensively in the suburb north of Paris alongside Paul Signac. Restaurant and café exterior subjects were deeply embedded in the Impressionist tradition — Manet, Renoir, and Degas had all painted the social world of Parisian dining and drinking as scenes of modern life — and Van Gogh's restaurant paintings engage with this lineage while bringing his own developing style to bear. The Rispal was one of several suburban restaurants where Van Gogh and Signac ate during their Asnières painting sessions, and its specific character — the striped awning, the outdoor tables, the cheerful ordinariness of a local establishment — interested him more than the grander Parisian cafés he knew from Montmartre. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City holds this work alongside a distinguished collection of French and American Impressionism. Van Gogh's version of the restaurant exterior demonstrates his 1887 technique in transition: brighter than Nuenen, more structured than pure Impressionism, showing the influence of both Divisionism and Japanese woodblock print simplification in its handling of the architectural surface and the surrounding vegetation.

The composition is relatively direct — the restaurant facade viewed at close range with its striped awning and outdoor tables. Van Gogh applies paint in varied, confident strokes, with the architectural elements rendered more firmly than the surrounding vegetation. The palette is lighter and more varied than his Dutch period work, reflecting Impressionist influence.