Bank of the Seine

Bank of the Seine (1887), at the Van Gogh Museum, shows Van Gogh exploring the river landscape on Paris's outskirts during his Paris period. The Seine and its banks offered a classic Impressionist landscape subject that he could approach fresh, using the genre's established conventions as a framework while pushing beyond them with his developing colour and brushwork experiments. River subjects allowed him to explore water's reflective and moving surfaces—a technical challenge that produced some of the most visually complex passages in his Paris landscape work, combining the observed movement of water with systematic colour notation.

River surface painting required Van Gogh to develop a specific brushwork for water—horizontal strokes that suggest the plane of the surface while broken colour notation captures the movement and reflection of light on moving water. The bank and vegetation above the water line are painted with his characteristic directional strokes following natural forms. The composition's horizontal organisation reinforces the stillness or movement of the water below.