Paris - França
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OST - 46x38 - 1886
The year 1886
marked one of great growth and experimentation for van Gogh. The budding artist
moved from Antwerp, where he’d spent his days frequenting museums and studying
works by Northern masters like Hals and Rubens, to the bustling bohemian haven
of Paris, where he’d soon encounter the French avant-garde. The two years
that van Gogh spent in the French metropolis would prove pivotal in the
artist’s career, taking his works from the heavier, fuliginous compositions
inspired by Dutch masters to the lively and prismatic works for which the
artist is best remembered.
After securing
lodging with his brother Theo in February of 1886, van Gogh sought further
artistic study in Paris and soon enrolled in the Atelier Cormon. Though the
temperamental artist would find little satisfaction in his instruction there,
it was at Cormon’s studio that van Gogh would encounter and befriend Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac and Émile Bernard, forever altering the
trajectory of his career. Shortly after leaving Cormon’s studio, van
Gogh shifted his attention from drawing to painting and indulged his
newfound lust for color. Writing to British painter Horace Mann Livens,
van Gogh recounted: “as we said at the time in COLOUR seeking LIFE, the true
drawing is modeling with colour.” He reported that he had completed “a
dozen landscapes too, frankly green, frankly blue,” by the fall of 1886. In
this same letter, van Gogh conveyed his great appreciation for Paris and its
artists: “In Antwerp I did not even know what the Impressionists were, now I
have seen them and though not being one of the club yet I have much
admired certain Impressionist pictures–DEGAS, nude figure–Claude Monet,
landscape”.
Painted just a
few months after van Gogh’s arrival in Paris, People Strolling in a Park
in Paris portrays a daytime jaunt in one of the city's oldest parks and as
such captures a moment in the metropolis’ historic evolution. As posited by the
Van Gogh Museum in Paris, the setting of this work is likely the Parc Monceau,
a small public space in the eighth arrondissement near where the van Gogh
brothers lived. Originally established as a public space by the Duke
of Orléans in 1778, the Parc Monceau changed hands over the
course of the French Revolution and Second Empire, eventually returning to the
ownership of Duke's family. After Napoleon III declared himself Emperor of
France in 1851, the monarch set out to revolutionize the French capital by
appointing Georges-Eugène Haussmann as the prefect in charge of massive urban
renewal campaigns. The “Hausmannization” of Paris included myriad public works
programs, not least of all the allotment and design of a number of urban parks.
During this time, the land allocated for Parc Monceau was divided in
two, with half being sold for development of luxury properties and the other
half reserved for the city of Paris. In 1861, the remaining undeveloped
land would become the first new public park under Baron Haussmann in
1861. An informal, English-style garden replete with worldly features like
an Egyptian pyramid, Dutch windmill and Chinese fort, the Parc
Monceau served as inspiration for countless artists in the 19th and 20th
centuries including Monet and Caillebotte.
The present
work reflects an autumnal enlivening of the artist’s palette, including
hues which recall van Gogh’s earlier Dutch works and yet are supplemented with
resplendent seasonal tones of sienna and ochre. It is around this time when the
influences of the newly-encountered Impressionists begin to take root in van
Gogh’s work. The depth and sweeping perspective of van Gogh's earlier
compositions, inspired by artists like Jean-François Millet, are here replaced
by a patchwork of seemingly spontaneous directional brushstrokes, heavily
impastoed and employed in the service of light and color. Painting wet-into-wet,
van Gogh imbues his trees and figures with a lively, spontaneous
quality which adds a sense of motion and impact to the seasonal scene.
Such qualities
are perhaps what inspired the glowing review by van Gogh’s first critic, Albert
Aurier, who in 1890 wrote: “In the case of Vincent van Gogh, in my opinion,
despite the sometimes misleading strangeness of his works, it is difficult for
an unprejudiced and knowledgeable viewer to deny or question the naive
truthfulness of his art, the ingeniousness of his vision. Indeed, independent
of this indefinable aroma of good faith and of the truly seen that all his
paintings exude, the choice of subjects, the constant harmony between the most
excessive colour notes, the conscientious study of character, the continual
search for the essential sign of each thing, a thousand significant details
undeniably assert his profound and almost childlike sincerity, his great love
for nature and for truth—his own personal truth” . A well-respected art critic
and collector associated with the Symbolist movement, Aurier owned a very
similar painting which remained in the writer’s collection until his
death.
Van Gogh’s
decadent yet harmonious use of color and great love of nature would reach a
glorious pitch during his later years in Arles with incomparable works
like L'Allée des Alyscamps whose verdant environs, autumnal tones,
and thick, directional brushwork were predicated on catalytic works like the
present. Stemming from the transformative Parisian period in van Gogh's
career, the present work provides a crucial link between the artist's earlier
and final works, and was celebrated most recently in London at the
monumental Van Gogh and Britain exhibition at the Tate.
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