Van Gogh, Vincent (1853-1890)
Bateau de Blanchisseuses sur la Seine (The Laundry Boat on the Seine at Asnières)
1887
Oil on canvas, 19.05 × 26.99 cm
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
The Laundry Boat on the Seine at Asnières exemplifies some of the radical directions emerging from the paintings Van Gogh completed in Paris. In March 1886, Van Gogh left his native Netherlands to reunite with his brother, Theo, in the French capital. Soon after, he began meeting with several leading avant-garde artists whose works embodied strong reactions against the Impressionist tendencies that dominated the Parisian art world. In 1887, Van Gogh took up residence in Asnières, a northwestern suburb of Paris, and his encounters with Signac and Gauguin proved catalytic for the painter’s developing practice. Gauguin shared Van Gogh‘s enthusiasm for 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints and emulated their large planes of color in his burgeoning Synthetism and Cloisonnism techniques. The compositional diagonals and strong contours in this painting recall both the distinctive divisions of the picture plane in Japanese landscapes and Gauguin’s simplified adaptation of these features. The scene’s striking chromatic contrasts and thickly layered brushstrokes also point to Van Gogh‘s interest in the experiments with complementary colors Seurat and Signac were making in these years. The restaurant and park scenes and the views of the Seine that Van Gogh completed while living in Asnières began to demonstrate the indelible influence of Synthetism, Divisionism, and Pointillism even as a unique Post-Impressionist style was emerging in his paintings. (VMFA)
See also:
• Asnières-sur-Seine (France)