A Woman Walking in a Garden

A woman strolls through a green garden sprinkled with flowers, framed by a painted red border. Van Gogh made her in 1887 near Paris, the summer he saw more colour than ever before, and no one knows who she is.

The story behind the painting

Van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886, following artists such as Seurat, Signac, Angrand and Emile Bernard. New trains made the suburbs along the Seine easy to reach, and towns like Clichy, the setting of this picture, were turning industrial, with coal, gas and factories beside quiet riverbanks. Days after seeing Signac's Ponton de la Felicite in 1887, Van Gogh began heading out to Asnieres and its surroundings. Recent research found he made the trip almost every day for three months between May and July 1887, producing around 40 paintings, this one among them.

What to look for

A woman walks through a lush green garden dotted with flowers, and behind her a building is hidden by a thick row of trees. A red painted border runs around the edge of the canvas. The palette is far brighter than in his earlier, earthy realist work, and the Clichy pictures are known for their pale greens. Look closely at the brushwork: short, defined, blunt strokes replace the blended, flat handling of his earlier paintings. This textured, broken touch was new for him then and became one of the marks of his most famous work.

Meaning and intent

The red border links the picture to Fishing in Spring in the Art Institute of Chicago and River Bank in Springtime in the Dallas Museum of Art, forming the Riverbank in Clichy Triptych, his first attempt at a triptych. In October 1887 he wrote to his sister Willemien that painting at Asnieres that summer he saw more colour than before, and that art now needed something very much alive, with strong colour and great intensity. The woman remains unknown: his letters do not mention her, partly because he lived with his brother Theo in Paris and had little reason to write to him.

Legacy

The painting was sold at Sotheby's in London in 2005 to an anonymous buyer and has stayed in a private collection. It was first exhibited publicly in 2023, in the Art Institute of Chicago's show Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape, from May to September. From October 2023 to January 2024 it hung in Van Gogh along the Seine at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where all three parts of the Clichy triptych were shown together for the first time. Afterwards it returned to its private owner.