Terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens

Van Gogh's Paris period (1886–1888) included numerous studies of parks and gardens in the city, painted as he absorbed the lessons of Impressionism directly from the movement's practitioners. The Luxembourg Gardens, with their formal terraces and bourgeois promenaders, gave him a subject the Impressionists had already made canonical, but his treatment sought to capture the peculiar quality of filtered Parisian light through tree canopies. These garden scenes represent his most explicitly Impressionist work — lighter, more atmospheric, and more socially comfortable than either the Nuenen dark period before or the Arles colour explosion after.

Dappled touches of pale green, yellow, and lavender build the light-filtered foliage. Figures are suggested with a few decisive marks rather than fully rendered. The palette is noticeably lighter and higher-keyed than anything from the Nuenen period.