The Seine with the Pont de Clichy
Vincent van Gogh , 1887
55 × 46.3 cm
oil on canvas
Private collection
The Seine with the Pont de Clichy (also the bridge of Clichy , Pont de Clichy or Pont d'Asnières ) is a painting by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh from 1887. The picture, painted in oil on canvas, has the dimensions 55 × 46, 3 cm. It was created during van Gogh's stay in Paris and shows the bank landscape on the Seine with the Pont de Clichy road bridge , a connection between the communities of Clichy and Asnières .
The work is part of a series of views of landscapes of the Parisian suburbs, which the painter created in the open air based on the impressionists' example . Stylistically, however, it stands at the transition from the artist's impressionist phase to his expressionist style of painting, which the artist developed in the following year in southern France. The painting was on permanent loan to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne for several years and is privately owned.
Image description
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In a letter to his brother Theo from March 1888, the year after the painting was made, Vincent van Gogh describes the content of the picture with the words "le pont de Clichy avec le ciel jaune et deux maisons qui se reflètent dans l'eau" ( The bridge of Clichy with a yellow sky and two houses that are reflected in the water ).
For this work, which was painted en plein air (in the open air), the artist chose a position close to the shore. The view extends over the Seine, sketched in blue vertical brushstrokes, to the opposite side of the river with its ocher-colored embankment . A trimmed arch of the bridge of Clichy can be seen on the right edge of the picture. The painter has reproduced the steel structure in light blue tones. On the bridge, near the right edge of the picture, two pedestrians are indicated by dots of gray. You come from the direction of the opposite bank, where two multi-story houses flank the street. While the roofs and contours of the buildings are kept in blue tones, the facades of the houses have horizontal yellow brushstrokes. There is also a blue and white color application on the side. Some windows are indicated by a few vertical gray-blue lines.
Van Gogh also added vegetation to the composition with several green brushstrokes. On the opposite side of the river, trees or bushes can be seen above the embankment, on the banks of the Seine there are some green spots of color from grasses. In addition, in the foreground of the picture, on the bank on this side, there is reed painted with thin long brushstrokes . This reed cut from the right and lower edge of the picture is reminiscent of similar depictions in Japanese woodcuts that van Gogh had seen shortly before in Paris. The painter has painted the summer sky over the landscape in lemon yellow and azure blue. The entire scenery on the opposite bank is reflected on the surface of the water, with the waves of the Seine blurring the lines.
For this painting, Van Gogh presumably used a commercially available pre-primed canvas in the standard size F 10, which was usually used for painting sketches. The cream-colored background has a slight yellow tinge. For the composition, van Gogh used a perspective frame that is sketched in one of his letters. With the help of this frame, which he used in twelve pictures from 1887, he brought composition lines in the form of a Union Jack onto the canvas with pencil . These auxiliary lines, like the preliminary drawing of the outlines, are partly visible to the naked eye.
The painting, referred to by the artist as étude (study), stands in van Gogh's work at the transition from his Parisian impressionist phase to his expressionist style, which he further developed in Arles from the beginning of 1888 . In contrast to his later work, van Gogh dispensed with an impasto painting style in the painting The Seine with the Pont de Clichy . For example, the paint applied in one or two layers in the area of the sky is largely smoothed out with the painting knife . In keeping with the sketchy character of the picture, van Gogh did not sign the painting.
Background to the creation of the painting
Van Gogh came to Paris in February 1886 and lived there with his brother Theo, who worked here as an art dealer. During the nearly two years of his stay in the French capital, he met leading Impressionist and Post- Impressionist artists such as Camille Pissarro , Edgar Degas , Paul Gauguin , Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac personally through his brother . Van Gogh exhibited some of his works at the paint dealer Père Tanguy , together with Claude Monet , Armand Guillaumin and Paul Signac. Here he met the painter Émile Bernard , who was 15 years his junior and with whom he became a close friend. In order to paint, they both went on excursions to the Paris area. They came to Asnières particularly frequently, where Bernard's parents lived. The painting The Seine with the Pont de Clichy was also created here in the summer of 1887 .
Through the Parisian artists, van Gogh came to outdoor painting and his painting style turned to a fleeting brushstroke . He chose lighter colors than before during his time in the Netherlands. The melancholy motifs with Dutch farmers that had been painted so far gave way to impressionistic landscapes. Here he preferred less views of the big city, but chose the slopes of Montmartre , which at the time were still rural, or he went to the Parisian suburbs. In a letter to his sister Wilhelmina he wrote “En toen ik dezen zomer te Asnieres landschap schilderde zag ik er meer kleur in dan vroeger” ( And when I was painting landscapes in Asnière this summer, I saw more colors in them than before ).
Van Gogh's series of bridges over the Seine
One of the few pictures that van Gogh painted in downtown Paris is the view of the Pont du Carrousel with Louvre from June 1886 (private collection). In this vedute he shows a motif that can also be found in the work of Camille Pissarro. In this first bridge motif from the Parisian period, the brown tones still predominate and the painting style does not yet show the fleeting brushstrokes typical of van Gogh's later works.
The bridges on the Seine near Asnières from the following year ( Foundation EG Bührle Collection ) are completely different in their choice of motifs and painting style . The river and the sky in particular are still bathed in dark colors, but a lighter palette can already be seen in the foreground. For this painting, as in Die Seine, Van Gogh chose a position close to the bank with the Pont de Clichy . In the pictures The Seine with the Pont de la Grande Jatte ( Van Gogh Museum ) and especially in the Seine Bridge near Asnières (private collection), also made in the summer of 1887, it is evident how the artist's choice of colors in the pictures of the Seine landscapes is brightened.
Pont du Carrousel with Louvre , 1886, private collection
Bridges over the Seine near Asnières , 1887, Foundation EG Bührle Collection
The Seine with the Pont de la Grande Jatte , 1887, Van Gogh Museum
Seine bridge at Asnières , 1887, private collection
In the painting Seineufer in spring at the Pont de Clichy ( Dallas Museum of Art ) from 1887 van Gogh shows the bridge Pont de Clichy for the first time. The artist's location is again close to the Seine, but the foreground of dotted vegetation on this side of the river takes up a large part of the picture and several trees obstruct the view of the water. As in the painting The Seine with the Pont de Clichy, only a section of the road bridge, which is also largely covered, can be seen.
In Anglers and Boats at the Pont de Clichy ( Art Institute of Chicago ) from the same year, the point of view has moved even further to the shore. The view of the bridge is blocked by a tree on the right, whose branches almost completely obscure the view of the sky. As in the painting The Seine with the Pont de Clichy , vegetation protrudes into the picture on the left in the foreground. The rural character of the Parisian suburbs at the time of Van Gogh's stay becomes clear both in anglers and boats on the Pont de Clichy and in the Seine river in spring on the Pont de Clichy .
In the picture Seineufer at the Pont de Clichy (private collection), also painted in the summer of 1887 , van Gogh finally shows the same motif as in The Seine with the Pont de Clichy . In the painting Seineufer at the Pont de Clichy, however, the position of the painter is no longer the opposite bank of the river, but has moved to the same side of the river at the level of the bank path as the two houses near the bridge. A large part of the picture shows the embankment overgrown with grass, of the houses almost only the roofs can be seen and on the right edge of the picture the cut bridge arch is shown frontally. In this painting, the river takes up only a small space on the right edge and the gray tones of the sky make this picture darker than the banks of the Seine at the Pont de Clichy with its strong yellow tones and lively reflections on the water. During his stay in Arles in the south of France, van Gogh took up the bridge theme again in 1888 and created views such as that of the Langlois bridge .
River Seine in Spring at the Pont de Clichy , 1887, Dallas Museum of Art
Anglers and Boats at the Pont de Clichy , 1887, Art Institute of Chicago
Bank of the Seine at the Pont de Clichy , 1887, private collection
Provenance
The painting was publicly exhibited only once during Vincent van Gogh's lifetime. In 1888 the art dealer Hermanus Gijsbertus Tersteeg (1845–1927) showed the picture in an exhibition in the Netherlands, where it was not bought. After the artist's death in 1890 and the death of his brother Theo in 1891, the painting came into the possession of Theo's wife Johanna van Gogh-Bonger . A few years later she sold the picture to the Parisian art dealer Bernheim-Jeune , which showed the painting in their gallery in 1901 as part of a Van Gogh exhibition. In 1905 the work was exhibited in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and was subsequently shown in Utrecht and Rotterdam. In the following years the painting was mainly exhibited in German-speaking countries. It was shown in Munich, Dresden, Frankfurt ( Kunstverein ), Zurich and Berlin in 1908 and was shown again in Munich in 1909 and at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 1910. A little later, the painting came to the Essen-born engineer Franz Herbert Hirschland (1880–1973) via Paul Cassirer's Berlin gallery . This moved in 1914 to the United States, and later settled in Harrison in New York down.
Hirschland sold van Gogh's painting in 1970 to the New York art dealer Aquavella Galleries , which resold it to the Geneva-based collector William Gelender. On May 10, 1988, the painting was auctioned at the New York branch of the Sotheby’s auction house, but found no buyer. Subsequently, the investor group Fine Arts Collectors Ltd. the painting, which it later sold to the Swiss collector Gérard Corboud . In 2001 Courbod gave more than 170 paintings from his collection to the city of Cologne on permanent loan, and the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum was then given the name & Fondation Corboud . For a long time it seemed that van Gogh's Die Seine with the Pont de Clichy would also belong to this part of his collection. The picture hung in the museum's rooms for twelve years and was in the museum's exhibition catalogs with the inventory number WRM-Dep. 813 marked as owned by the museum. In fact, the picture belonged to the Fondation Surpierre , a foundation in which Corboud gathered his private art possessions. In 2013, Corboud put the painting up for auction at the Zurich auction house Koller. The picture was sold to an unknown bidder for 6.57 million Swiss francs (including buyer's premium).
literature
- Jacob-Baart de la Faille : L'oeuvre de Vincent Van Gogh, catalog raisonné . Editions G. van Oest, Paris and Brussels 1928.
- Ingo F. Walther, Rainer Metzger: Vincent van Gogh, all paintings . Taschen, Cologne 1989–1992, ISBN 3-8228-0396-0 .
- Ronald Pickvance : Van Gogh in Arles . The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Abrams, New York 1984, ISBN 0-87099-376-3 .
- Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker: Vincent van Gogh - The letters, the complete illustrated and annotated edition . Thames & Hudson, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-500-23865-3 .
Web links
- Caroline von Saint-George: Vincent van Gogh, The Bridge of Clichy, short report on painting technique and condition . On the Cologne Museums website (PDF file; 1.5 MB)
- Stefan Koldehoff: The museum as a machine for increasing value. Frankfurter Allgemeine from May 24, 2013
Individual evidence
- ↑ Title of the picture The Seine with the Pont de Clichy after Ingo F. Walther, Rainer Metzger: Vincent van Gogh, all paintings , p. 241; Bridge from Clichy to p. 110; Pont de Clichy after Ronald Pickvance: Van Gogh in Arles , p. 264 ;, Pont d'Asnières after Jacob-Baart de la Faille: L'oeuvre de Vincent Van Gogh, catalog raisonné , vol. 1, no. 303, p. 87.
- ↑ Letter No. 589 (LT 471) of March 25, 1888 (not dated, possibly also March 24, 1888) in Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker: Vincent van Gogh - The letters .
- ↑ Vincent van Gogh sketched a perspective frame in a letter dated 5./6. August 1882 to his brother Theo. Letter No. 589 (LT223) in Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker: Vincent van Gogh - The letters .
- ↑ Caroline von Saint-George: Vincent van Gogh, The Bridge of Clichy, short report on painting technique and condition . Research project "Painting Technique of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism", Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne and Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Institute for Restoration and Conservation Science (CICS), Cologne 2008 Archive link ( Memento of the original from May 2, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info : The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 1.5 MB)
- ↑ Letter No. 574 of the end of October 1887 in Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker: Vincent van Gogh - The letters .
- ^ Stefan Koldehoff: The museum as a machine for increasing value. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine , May 24, 2013.
- ↑ Auction result on the website of the auction house http://www.kollerauktionen.ch
