View of a River with Rowing Boats

Van Gogh's 1887 river paintings at Asnières form one of the most coherent bodies of work from his Paris period — a sustained engagement with a specific suburban landscape where modernism and leisure intersected. Asnières-sur-Seine, a northwestern suburb, had become famous in avant-garde circles when Seurat exhibited his Bathers at Asnières at the Salon des Indépendants in 1884, and Signac was working there regularly. Van Gogh went to paint alongside Signac in the spring and summer of 1887, and the experience pushed him hard toward the Divisionist color methods the Neo-Impressionists had codified. This view of the river with rowing boats participates in a specifically Post-Impressionist dialogue: where Monet and Renoir had painted the leisure boating at Argenteuil with softer atmospheric light in the 1870s, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Signac were now treating the same suburban water subjects with heightened color contrast and more deliberate touch. Rowing boats on suburban rivers were quintessentially modern subjects — recreation made accessible by the railway, the democratic leisure of the new urban working and middle classes. Van Gogh's version brings more expressive urgency than Seurat's cool science to what was otherwise a shared subject.

The river subject gives Van Gogh material for practicing his treatment of water reflections and the specific quality of light on the Seine. The boats provide compositional structure within the horizontal water surface. His evolving Paris palette brings varied color to the scene — blues and greens of water, warm tones of boats and riverbanks.