Restaurant de la Sirène at Asnières, The

Van Gogh's Restaurant de la Sirène at Asnières, painted in 1887 and now at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, depicts the suburban riverside restaurant near Paris where he often ate and painted during his Paris years. The restaurant exterior — its sign, terrace, and the figures of customers and passersby — was a quintessentially modern subject in the Impressionist tradition. The Ashmolean's possession of this work gives it a distinguished home in one of Oxford's great university museums. Van Gogh's Paris period restaurant paintings document the specific social world of suburban Paris that the Impressionists had made central to modern painting.

The restaurant exterior is rendered with Van Gogh's developing Impressionist approach — broken color, directional brushwork, a palette lighter than his Dutch period. The sign and architectural details of the building are observed with specific attention while the surrounding figures and vegetation are handled more loosely. Warm sunlight on the exterior creates a pleasantly direct chromatic effect.