Van Gogh, Monet and Magritte: three masterpieces that prove the long-lasting impact of Impressionism

For many months, domestic relations at the Van Gogh brothers’ small apartment in Montmartre were fraught. Theo worked in Paris as an art dealer, and in February 1886 had been unexpectedly joined in the city by his older sibling Vincent. The latter had dreams of making it big as an artist there, following an unsuccessful spell living in Antwerp.

Within a year of Vincent’s arrival, however, Theo was penning an anguished letter to his sister, Willemien. ‘The situation at home [is] unbearable,’ he wrote. Vincent was untidy and quarrelsome, so much so that ‘nobody wants to come and visit’. Theo concluded by saying ‘all I hope is that he will go and live by himself’.

Part of the problem was that the winter weather stifled the artist’s desire to paint en plein air, meaning he spent more time at the apartment than either he or his brother would have liked.

Thankfully, in the spring of 1887, ‘everything improved’, in the words of Theo’s future wife, Johanna Bonger. It was then that Vincent discovered the fashionable town of Asnières, a few miles northwest of Paris.

He was a keen walker, and so enjoyed the journey there and back, even with his canvases and painting paraphernalia to carry. According to Bonger, he also liked the Seine-side location — specifically, the ‘gay bright restaurants, the little boats on the river, the parks and the gardens, all sparkling with light and colour’.


From early May until late July, Vincent headed to Asnières almost daily. This period would prove to be a crucial one in his career, and a standout painting from it, Les canots amarrés, will be the centrepiece of the 20th/21st Century Inaugural Evening Sale on September 26 at The Henderson in Hong Kong (Christie’s new Asia Pacific headquarters).

Over the course of the three months in question, Van Gogh painted approximately 40 views in and around Asnières. Les canots amarrés depicts an expansive vista of the Seine, its title referring to the ‘boats moored’ along the banks as we look downstream. The luminous blue sky is mirrored in the glistening waters of the river.

Asnières at that time was a hub for boating enthusiasts. Easily accessible by train, it was also a picturesque retreat from the heat and noise of Paris for daytrippers and weekenders. In the picture coming to auction, one can even make out a few Parisian buildings in the distance.

Integral to Van Gogh’s painting campaign in the Asnières area were three separate triptychs, known as ‘Bord de la Seine à Asnières’, ‘La grande Jatte’, and ‘Bord de la Seine à Clichy’ respectively. Les canots amarrés forms part of the first of those, along with two paintings that are today found in museums (Ponts sur la Seine à Asnières at the Kunsthaus Zurich and Restaurant de la Sirène, Asnières at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford).

In these three works, one can see the product of Van Gogh’s absorption of a wealth of artistic lessons during his time in Paris, as he forged his own painterly style. In May 1886 he had visited the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, and a few months later attended the second edition of the Salon des Indépendants, which featured a host of Neo-Impressionist works by the likes of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac (including the former’s masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte).

The impact on Van Gogh was significant. With his ‘Bord de la Seine à Asnières’ paintings, he left behind for good the dark, earthy tones of his realist pictures of old. He now adopted a vibrant palette and loose expressive brushwork instead, which filled his canvases with a new sense of atmosphere and light.

This breakthrough in colour and technique would lead Van Gogh towards the stunning artistic feats he achieved after moving to the south of France the following year. The most important painting by the artist ever to be offered in Asia, Les canots amarrés marks a vital stepping stone in his career. As he himself wrote in a letter to Willemien in October 1887, ‘when I painted landscape in Asnières this summer, I saw more colour… than ever before’.

Though Claude Monet had been one of the founding Impressionists, he didn’t actually contribute to the group’s aforementioned final exhibition in 1886. By this point, he had to some extent moved on. Not least geographically. Having left Paris behind, he was now comfortably settled into life with his family in the village of Giverny.

Boasting just 300 inhabitants and untouched by modernisation, Giverny was located at the confluence of the Seine and its tributary, the River Epte, some 45 miles north-west of Paris. It was here that Monet hit upon the most famous motif of his career: the water-lilies in a large pond on his property.

These would inspire the artist to produce almost 300 paintings between 1897 and his death in 1926 - culminating in the remarkable, mural-sized panels known as the Grandes Décorations.

He created his first water lily paintings as a series of eight, and one of these works, Nymphéas, will be another highlight of the 20th/ 21st Century Inaugural Evening Sale at The Henderson. Four of the series are currently owned by museums (namely, the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome; and the Kagoshima City Museum of Art). No water lily painting has ever appeared at auction in Asia before.

An enthusiastic gardener since his youth, Monet had planted the water-lilies himself: both traditional varieties and new hybrid varieties sourced from a specialist nursery run by the renowned botanist, Joseph Latour-Marliac, in Lot in south-west France.

‘I planted [the water lilies] for the pure pleasure of it, and I grew them without thinking of painting them,’ Monet said late in life. ‘Then all at once, I had the revelation — how wonderful my pond was — and reached for my palette.

The eight paintings from his inaugural series vary in format, size, color and handling. Nymphéas has the most unified and subtle palette of the group: a harmonious range of blues, violets and greens, with two vivid white blossoms standing out in counterpoint. Monet’s brushwork also seems slightly less loose and spontaneous than it was when he painted his pioneering Impressionist pictures of the 1870s.

Finally, it’s worth stressing that Nymphéas introduced one of the most revolutionary aspects of the water lily works: the elimination of a perspectival viewpoint. That is, the removal of the horizon line, something radical in landscape painting at that time. Monet plunges us into the centre of the pond’s surface, removing all peripheral detail apart from a cluster of vegetation and the reflections of the sky.

In that respect, Nymphéas lives up to what’s often said of the water lily paintings as a whole: that they were fundamental works on the path of modern art towards abstraction.

Another painting in the upcoming sale with its roots in Impressionism is La préméditation. It comes from an ostensibly unlikely source: the Surrealist par excellence, René Magritte.

The Belgian artist is famous for his pictures of ordinary things in far-from-ordinary states, settings or combinations. Painted in 1943, La préméditation depicts an exuberant array of impossibly different flowers stemming from the same plant.

It dates to a short but important period in Magritte’s career, in the mid-1940s, when he produced light-filled works with bright colours and feathery brushstrokes. This is commonly referred to as his ‘Renoir period’. Magritte claimed that it was a response to the horrors of the Second World War, and to the German occupation of Brussels, where he was living.

‘A quite powerful charm has replaced the disquieting poetry I used to strive for,’ he said. Not for nothing is his work from this time also known as ‘sunlit Surrealism’. It retained a Magrittean idiom, but boasted a style reminiscent of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s in his prime.

Like Les canots amarrés and Nymphéas, La préméditation proves that Impressionism continued to stimulate great painters even decades after its emergence.