Exterior of a Restaurant in Asnières

The Restaurant exterior series from Asnières (summer 1887) represents Van Gogh's most sustained engagement with colour as pure phenomenon rather than descriptive tool. He and Émile Bernard worked side by side painting these modest suburban restaurant facades, and the resulting canvases — building fronts, awnings, tables on pavements — show Van Gogh at his most inventively Impressionist. The cheerful vulgarity of suburban commercial architecture appealed to him precisely because it was free of the aesthetic pretensions of Parisian salon subjects, offering colour in its most direct, unmediated form: painted signboards, striped awnings, bright tablecloths.

High-keyed complementary contrasts — red against green, orange against blue — build the facade in short, comma-like strokes. The handling is the most demonstrably Impressionist in Van Gogh's entire output, reflecting the direct influence of Monet and Pissarro's facture. The paint surface is lively and varied, with no passage of inert background.