.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
‘And when I painted landscape in Asnières this summer I saw more color in it than ever before.’ ——Vincent van Gogh
Painted during the artist’s transformational two-year stay in Paris, Les canots amarrés is one of a formative series of landscape paintings that Vincent van Gogh created in the summer of 1887 at Asnières, a fashionable suburb situated on the Seine to the northwest of the capital. From May to July, Van Gogh made the short journey from his home in Montmartre to this picturesque town. It was here that the wealth of stylistic lessons he had absorbed from his time in the city came into their own as he forged his distinctive painterly style in the creation of a number of picturesque landscapes.
Les canots amarrés is one of a rare and important group of three triptychs that have been described as the “artistic pinnacle” of the artist’s time in Asnières (B. Gerritse and J.N. Coutré (eds.), Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: Along the Seine, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago and Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, 2023-2024, p. 85). The other two canvases from the so-called “Bord de la Seine à Asnières” triptych are today held in museums—the Emil Bührle Collection, Zurich, and The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, respectively. Infused with a sense of bright summer light, Les canots amarrés and these closely related works see Van Gogh going beyond formal concerns alone—specifically his interest in Impressionist and Pointillist color and facture—to respond directly to nature itself, capturing a scene filled with a novel sense of freshness and luminosity that is entirely his own. This unique approach to the landscape would come to define Van Gogh’s art for the rest of his short but prolific career.
Van Gogh arrived in Paris unexpectedly at the end of February 1886. 'Don’t be cross with me that I’ve come all of a sudden,' he wrote to his brother, Theo, an art dealer already based in the city. 'I’ve thought about it so much and I think we’ll save time this way. Will be at the Louvre from midday… We’ll sort things out, you’ll see. So get there as soon as possible' (Letter 567, in L. Jansen, H. Luijten and N. Bakker (eds.), Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition, London, 2009, vol. 3, p. 362). Determined to leave Antwerp, where he had been living and working as an art student since November of the previous year, Van Gogh arrived ready 'to produce and to be something' (Letter 559, ibid., p. 350).
‘And do not forget, my dear fellow, that Paris is Paris. There is only one Paris, and, hard as it may be to live here, even if it were to grow harder and worse—French air clears the head and does one good, tremendously good.’——Vincent van Gogh
Upon his arrival, the artist threw himself into the development of his art, determined to establish a public career. He had first visited the capital in 1875-1876 when he worked for the print dealers, Goupil and Cie. Thanks to his brother’s connections, Van Gogh enrolled in the prestigious atelier of the Salon artist, Fernand Cormon. There, he met fellow students Louis Anquetin, Emile Bernard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, all of whom would play an important role in his artistic development. His time at Cormon’s studio was however short lived. He did not like the focus on traditional methods of artistic training, namely the depiction of plaster models, and left after just three months.
Instead, Van Gogh continued his artistic education by plunging himself into the art world of Paris. In May 1886, he visited the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, famous for the debut of Georges Seurat’s Un dimanche d’été à l’Ile de La Grande Jatte. There, the artist also found works by Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Paul Gauguin. While Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir had declined to contribute to the show, Van Gogh was able to see their art at the concurrent Fifth Exposition Internationale at the Galerie Georges Petit. Later in the year, Van Gogh attended the Salon des Indépendants, studying again Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, and the new divisionist paintings of Paul Signac and Camille Pissarro. Works in this radical new style were even more prominent in the third Indépendants exhibition on view from March to May 1887.
As a result of these influences, Van Gogh forged forward with the creation of his own painterly style, both in terms of subject matter and handling. Leaving behind the dark, earthy tones of his realist paintings, he looked to the distinctive handling of the pointillists, experimenting with this radical mode of facture, which lightened and refined his painterly touch, allowing his canvases to be filled with a sense of atmosphere, as seen in Les canots amarrés. The implementation of the carefully calculated scientific theory that Seurat and Signac practiced in their painting, did not ultimately appeal to Van Gogh, who went about discovering his own, more instinctive way with colour. Instead of the prescribed pointillist dot painstakingly placed on the canvas, Van Gogh preferred longer strokes, as seen in the present work, as well as an often more irregular combination of dots, dashes, and hatched, parallel strokes depending on the motif or object he was painting.
In the spring of 1887, in response to the ideas he had encountered in recent exhibitions, and at Theo’s urging, Van Gogh began painting outdoors. Encouraged by Bernard and Signac, Van Gogh chose Asnières for his painting “campaign,” as he described it, a village set along the stretch of the Seine that Monet and Renoir had worked in the previous decade, and Seurat had previously used as the setting for Une Baignade (1883-1884, National Gallery, London) (Letter 592, ibid., p. 42). A quintessential late nineteenth-century suburb, Asnières was a center for boating enthusiasts, a picturesque retreat from the heat and noise of Paris during the summer, and a popular destination for weekend day-trippers.
'I ran into [Van Gogh] at Asnières and Saint-Ouen,' Signac later recalled of Van Gogh’s time spent painting there, 'we painted on the banks of the river and ate in a country café, and we returned to Paris on foot, through the streets of Saint-Ouen and Clichy. Van Gogh wore a blue zinc worker’s smock and had painted colored smudges on the sleeves. Pressed closely against me, he walked along, shouting and gesticulating, waving his freshly painted oversize canvas, smearing paint on himself and the passers-by' (quoted in J. Hulsker, The New Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1996, p. 282).
Over the course of these summer months, Van Gogh painted an array of views in and around Asnières. He was particularly drawn to the stretch of the Seine that bordered the town, picturing the two bridges, one pedestrian, the other a railway, that traversed it, the handful of picturesque restaurants that lined its banks, as well as the boats that often flowed down its gentle waters. The present work depicts an expansive vista of the river looking downstream with boats moored along its banks—the footbridge and railway bridge would have been just behind Van Gogh as he painted this view. A few of the buildings of Paris are just visible in the distance, while the tip of the Ile de la Grande Jatte is visible on the far right of the composition, the taller, darker bank of trees depicting this popular artistic spot of the time. “The result,” as Ronald Pickvance described, “is the most open, expansive, air-filled, deep-spaced, sky-dominant of all Van Gogh’s paintings of the Seine” (Vincent van Gogh, exh. cat., Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, 2000, p. 294).
Les canots amarrés has been identified as one of the canvases in a set of three triptychs that dominated Van Gogh’s output during his time in Asnières. In 1890, an inventory of Theo Van Gogh’s apartment in Paris was made by Andries Bonger, the brother of Theo’s wife, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. This list described these triptychs, which were titled: “La grande Jatte,” “Bord de la Seine à Asnières,” and “Bord de la Seine à Clichy.” While a number of previous sources have suggested different compilations for the triptychs, each of which share the same horizontal format and similar canvas size, the present work is now believed to have formed part of the so-called “Bord de la Seine à Asnières” trio, along with Ponts sur la Seine à Asnières (Faille, no. 301; Emil Bührle Collection, Zurich) and Restaurant de la Sirène, Asnières (Faille, no. 312; The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, exh. cat., op. cit., 2023-2024, p. 85).
Johanna van Gogh-Bonger described the triptychs later, in 1958, writing, 'With spring everything improved. Vincent could work in the open air again and painted much as Asnières, where he painted the beautiful triptych of "I’Isle [sic] de la Grande Jatte", the borders of the Seine with their gay, bright restaurants, the little boats on the river, the parks and the gardens, all sparkling with light and color' (quoted in ibid., p. 187).
It has been suggested that Van Gogh painted a number of the Asnières landscapes on a single piece of canvas. The works in the “Bord de la Seine à Asnières” and “Bord de la Seine à Clichy” triptychs are distinguished by Van Gogh’s addition of a painted red border that surrounds the edges of the compositions. These, Bregje Gerritse has written, 'were not meant to indicate that the canvases belonged together, but rather served a practical purpose. Research shows that each of these triptychs was made from a long piece of canvas, which Van Gogh only split into three parts after painting… Van Gogh marked out three rectangles with red paint over the canvas, which must have measured over a meter and a half in length' (quoted in ibid., p. 91).
The artist’s friend, Bernard, provided a fascinating insight into this novel working method. He recalled witnessing Van Gogh, 'With a large canvas slung on his back, he set off on his journey. He then split it up into so many compartments, depending on the subjects. When evening came, he brought it back, filled up, like a little mobile museum, in which all the emotions of his day were captured. Stretches of the Seine full of boats, islands with blue swings, smart restaurants and multi-colored awnings, oleanders, corners of abandoned parks, and properties for sale' (quoted in ibid.).
The present work is therefore a rare and important canvas that, with its partner paintings, formed the most panoramic vision of Asnières. Regarded as a trio, Les canots amarrés, Ponts sur la Seine à Asnières and Restaurant de la Sirène, Asnières share a similar handling and palette as well as horizon line, as if Van Gogh has rotated his gaze to take in and depict these picturesque landscape scenes. Yet, each composition is carefully distinguished so as to give as rounded as possible a vision of the landscape that lay before him. The Bührle’s vista embodies the bustling activity and industry that defined Asnières, with a steam train passing along the railway bridge and a number of figures on the banks and on boats amid the river as the view upstream recedes into the distance. By contrast, in the Ashmolean’s canvas, Van Gogh has positioned himself down on the riverbank to look upwards at the restaurant, the only sign of human activity the fluttering flags that adorn its windows. The present work offers the most open and expansive view of the area, the luminous blue sky mirrored in the sparkling waters of the Seine below.
In 1896, the triptychs were exhibited at the dealer, Ambroise Vollard’s gallery. Having sold them separately, they were subsequently split up (M. Vellekoop et al., (eds.), Van Gogh’s Studio Practice, Amsterdam and Brussels, 2013, p. 168). After passing through the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris and the Independent Gallery, London, Les canots amarrés was acquired by an important Scottish collector of modern art, John Tattersall. In 1933, the work bought from Tattersall by Royan Middleton, a greetings card publisher who was another pioneering early collector of Van Gogh in the United Kingdom. The paining remained in his family’s collection for much of the rest of the century, before it was sold at auction in 1991.
Painted during the artist’s transformational two-year stay in Paris, Les canots amarrés is one of a formative series of landscape paintings that Vincent van Gogh created in the summer of 1887 at Asnières, a fashionable suburb situated on the Seine to the northwest of the capital. From May to July, Van Gogh made the short journey from his home in Montmartre to this picturesque town. It was here that the wealth of stylistic lessons he had absorbed from his time in the city came into their own as he forged his distinctive painterly style in the creation of a number of picturesque landscapes.
Les canots amarrés is one of a rare and important group of three triptychs that have been described as the “artistic pinnacle” of the artist’s time in Asnières (B. Gerritse and J.N. Coutré (eds.), Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: Along the Seine, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago and Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, 2023-2024, p. 85). The other two canvases from the so-called “Bord de la Seine à Asnières” triptych are today held in museums—the Emil Bührle Collection, Zurich, and The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, respectively. Infused with a sense of bright summer light, Les canots amarrés and these closely related works see Van Gogh going beyond formal concerns alone—specifically his interest in Impressionist and Pointillist color and facture—to respond directly to nature itself, capturing a scene filled with a novel sense of freshness and luminosity that is entirely his own. This unique approach to the landscape would come to define Van Gogh’s art for the rest of his short but prolific career.
Van Gogh arrived in Paris unexpectedly at the end of February 1886. 'Don’t be cross with me that I’ve come all of a sudden,' he wrote to his brother, Theo, an art dealer already based in the city. 'I’ve thought about it so much and I think we’ll save time this way. Will be at the Louvre from midday… We’ll sort things out, you’ll see. So get there as soon as possible' (Letter 567, in L. Jansen, H. Luijten and N. Bakker (eds.), Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition, London, 2009, vol. 3, p. 362). Determined to leave Antwerp, where he had been living and working as an art student since November of the previous year, Van Gogh arrived ready 'to produce and to be something' (Letter 559, ibid., p. 350).
‘And do not forget, my dear fellow, that Paris is Paris. There is only one Paris, and, hard as it may be to live here, even if it were to grow harder and worse—French air clears the head and does one good, tremendously good.’——Vincent van Gogh
Upon his arrival, the artist threw himself into the development of his art, determined to establish a public career. He had first visited the capital in 1875-1876 when he worked for the print dealers, Goupil and Cie. Thanks to his brother’s connections, Van Gogh enrolled in the prestigious atelier of the Salon artist, Fernand Cormon. There, he met fellow students Louis Anquetin, Emile Bernard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, all of whom would play an important role in his artistic development. His time at Cormon’s studio was however short lived. He did not like the focus on traditional methods of artistic training, namely the depiction of plaster models, and left after just three months.
Instead, Van Gogh continued his artistic education by plunging himself into the art world of Paris. In May 1886, he visited the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, famous for the debut of Georges Seurat’s Un dimanche d’été à l’Ile de La Grande Jatte. There, the artist also found works by Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Paul Gauguin. While Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir had declined to contribute to the show, Van Gogh was able to see their art at the concurrent Fifth Exposition Internationale at the Galerie Georges Petit. Later in the year, Van Gogh attended the Salon des Indépendants, studying again Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, and the new divisionist paintings of Paul Signac and Camille Pissarro. Works in this radical new style were even more prominent in the third Indépendants exhibition on view from March to May 1887.
As a result of these influences, Van Gogh forged forward with the creation of his own painterly style, both in terms of subject matter and handling. Leaving behind the dark, earthy tones of his realist paintings, he looked to the distinctive handling of the pointillists, experimenting with this radical mode of facture, which lightened and refined his painterly touch, allowing his canvases to be filled with a sense of atmosphere, as seen in Les canots amarrés. The implementation of the carefully calculated scientific theory that Seurat and Signac practiced in their painting, did not ultimately appeal to Van Gogh, who went about discovering his own, more instinctive way with colour. Instead of the prescribed pointillist dot painstakingly placed on the canvas, Van Gogh preferred longer strokes, as seen in the present work, as well as an often more irregular combination of dots, dashes, and hatched, parallel strokes depending on the motif or object he was painting.
In the spring of 1887, in response to the ideas he had encountered in recent exhibitions, and at Theo’s urging, Van Gogh began painting outdoors. Encouraged by Bernard and Signac, Van Gogh chose Asnières for his painting “campaign,” as he described it, a village set along the stretch of the Seine that Monet and Renoir had worked in the previous decade, and Seurat had previously used as the setting for Une Baignade (1883-1884, National Gallery, London) (Letter 592, ibid., p. 42). A quintessential late nineteenth-century suburb, Asnières was a center for boating enthusiasts, a picturesque retreat from the heat and noise of Paris during the summer, and a popular destination for weekend day-trippers.
'I ran into [Van Gogh] at Asnières and Saint-Ouen,' Signac later recalled of Van Gogh’s time spent painting there, 'we painted on the banks of the river and ate in a country café, and we returned to Paris on foot, through the streets of Saint-Ouen and Clichy. Van Gogh wore a blue zinc worker’s smock and had painted colored smudges on the sleeves. Pressed closely against me, he walked along, shouting and gesticulating, waving his freshly painted oversize canvas, smearing paint on himself and the passers-by' (quoted in J. Hulsker, The New Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1996, p. 282).
Over the course of these summer months, Van Gogh painted an array of views in and around Asnières. He was particularly drawn to the stretch of the Seine that bordered the town, picturing the two bridges, one pedestrian, the other a railway, that traversed it, the handful of picturesque restaurants that lined its banks, as well as the boats that often flowed down its gentle waters. The present work depicts an expansive vista of the river looking downstream with boats moored along its banks—the footbridge and railway bridge would have been just behind Van Gogh as he painted this view. A few of the buildings of Paris are just visible in the distance, while the tip of the Ile de la Grande Jatte is visible on the far right of the composition, the taller, darker bank of trees depicting this popular artistic spot of the time. “The result,” as Ronald Pickvance described, “is the most open, expansive, air-filled, deep-spaced, sky-dominant of all Van Gogh’s paintings of the Seine” (Vincent van Gogh, exh. cat., Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, 2000, p. 294).
Les canots amarrés has been identified as one of the canvases in a set of three triptychs that dominated Van Gogh’s output during his time in Asnières. In 1890, an inventory of Theo Van Gogh’s apartment in Paris was made by Andries Bonger, the brother of Theo’s wife, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. This list described these triptychs, which were titled: “La grande Jatte,” “Bord de la Seine à Asnières,” and “Bord de la Seine à Clichy.” While a number of previous sources have suggested different compilations for the triptychs, each of which share the same horizontal format and similar canvas size, the present work is now believed to have formed part of the so-called “Bord de la Seine à Asnières” trio, along with Ponts sur la Seine à Asnières (Faille, no. 301; Emil Bührle Collection, Zurich) and Restaurant de la Sirène, Asnières (Faille, no. 312; The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, exh. cat., op. cit., 2023-2024, p. 85).
Johanna van Gogh-Bonger described the triptychs later, in 1958, writing, 'With spring everything improved. Vincent could work in the open air again and painted much as Asnières, where he painted the beautiful triptych of "I’Isle [sic] de la Grande Jatte", the borders of the Seine with their gay, bright restaurants, the little boats on the river, the parks and the gardens, all sparkling with light and color' (quoted in ibid., p. 187).
It has been suggested that Van Gogh painted a number of the Asnières landscapes on a single piece of canvas. The works in the “Bord de la Seine à Asnières” and “Bord de la Seine à Clichy” triptychs are distinguished by Van Gogh’s addition of a painted red border that surrounds the edges of the compositions. These, Bregje Gerritse has written, 'were not meant to indicate that the canvases belonged together, but rather served a practical purpose. Research shows that each of these triptychs was made from a long piece of canvas, which Van Gogh only split into three parts after painting… Van Gogh marked out three rectangles with red paint over the canvas, which must have measured over a meter and a half in length' (quoted in ibid., p. 91).
The artist’s friend, Bernard, provided a fascinating insight into this novel working method. He recalled witnessing Van Gogh, 'With a large canvas slung on his back, he set off on his journey. He then split it up into so many compartments, depending on the subjects. When evening came, he brought it back, filled up, like a little mobile museum, in which all the emotions of his day were captured. Stretches of the Seine full of boats, islands with blue swings, smart restaurants and multi-colored awnings, oleanders, corners of abandoned parks, and properties for sale' (quoted in ibid.).
The present work is therefore a rare and important canvas that, with its partner paintings, formed the most panoramic vision of Asnières. Regarded as a trio, Les canots amarrés, Ponts sur la Seine à Asnières and Restaurant de la Sirène, Asnières share a similar handling and palette as well as horizon line, as if Van Gogh has rotated his gaze to take in and depict these picturesque landscape scenes. Yet, each composition is carefully distinguished so as to give as rounded as possible a vision of the landscape that lay before him. The Bührle’s vista embodies the bustling activity and industry that defined Asnières, with a steam train passing along the railway bridge and a number of figures on the banks and on boats amid the river as the view upstream recedes into the distance. By contrast, in the Ashmolean’s canvas, Van Gogh has positioned himself down on the riverbank to look upwards at the restaurant, the only sign of human activity the fluttering flags that adorn its windows. The present work offers the most open and expansive view of the area, the luminous blue sky mirrored in the sparkling waters of the Seine below.
In 1896, the triptychs were exhibited at the dealer, Ambroise Vollard’s gallery. Having sold them separately, they were subsequently split up (M. Vellekoop et al., (eds.), Van Gogh’s Studio Practice, Amsterdam and Brussels, 2013, p. 168). After passing through the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris and the Independent Gallery, London, Les canots amarrés was acquired by an important Scottish collector of modern art, John Tattersall. In 1933, the work bought from Tattersall by Royan Middleton, a greetings card publisher who was another pioneering early collector of Van Gogh in the United Kingdom. The paining remained in his family’s collection for much of the rest of the century, before it was sold at auction in 1991.