To accompany the exhibition Van Gogh along the Seine, the Van Gogh Museum organised a Study Day on Thursday 12 October 2023.
A group of forty experts, including the authors of the exhibition catalogue, colleagues from museums, experts in the field and institutional and private lenders, travelled to Amsterdam for the event. The dedicated Study Day gave the group the opportunity to take a deep dive into the exhibition before it opened to the public, to discuss topics in more depth, and to exchange new ideas and questions that arose from the exhibition.
Introductions in the auditorium
The morning started in the museum’s auditorium with a word of welcome by Marije Vellekoop, Head of Collections and Research at the Van Gogh Museum, followed by an extensive Introduction to the exhibition by Bregje Gerritse, Researcher and curator of the exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum.
Van Gogh along the Seine was a groundbreaking exhibition that showed how the area along the Seine around Asnières, to the north-west of Paris, was crucial to the artistic development of Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries: Paul Signac, Georges Seurat, Emile Bernard and Charles Angrand. In the nineteenth century, leisure activities around the Seine became increasingly important for Parisians. New train stations and bridges made the suburbs of Paris more accessible and therefore increasingly popular. At the same time, smoking factory chimneys increasingly dominated the horizon.
Between 1881 and 1890, the five ambitious artists travelled on foot to the banks of the Seine with their painting supplies on their backs. With their easel in the green, they captured the changes brought about by the emerging industry. They found new, modern motifs and developed their use of colour and painting techniques.