Fishing in Spring, the Pont de Clichy (Asnières)

Vincent van Gogh · 1887

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

50.5 × 60 cm (19 7/8 × 23 5/8 in.); Framed: 71.2 × 78.5 × 4.8 cm (28 × 30 7/8 × 1 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

Painted in the spring of 1887, this luminous riverside scene captures the Seine near Asnières on a bright afternoon, with a lone fisherman and a small skiff framed by the iron arc of the Pont de Clichy. Van Gogh completed this work during his two-year stay in Paris, where exposure to the Impressionists and Pointillists transformed his palette almost overnight. Gone were the dark earthy tones of his Dutch period — in their place, vibrant blues, greens, and yellows applied in energetic, directional strokes that shimmer with reflected light. The composition is deceptively simple, but the layered brushwork and colour contrasts give the surface a restless, living quality unlike anything produced by his contemporaries. Van Gogh painted several canvases along this stretch of the Seine during the summer of 1887, drawn repeatedly to the way industrial Paris dissolved into something quietly pastoral at the water's edge. A skilled hand-painted oil reproduction conveys what a print cannot — the texture of loaded brushstrokes, the depth of layered glazes, and the physical presence of paint on canvas that makes standing before a van Gogh feel so immediate.