Vincent van Gogh – Fishing in Spring, the Pont de Clichy, 1887 | Giclée Print

The Seine at Asnières in spring, seen from under the willows, with two moored punts and a fisherman. Everything is broken into short separate strokes — green, blue, yellow, pink — laid side by side rather than mixed. This is Van Gogh in Paris in 1887, painting beside Paul Signac and trying out what the divisionists had worked out about light.

What the technique is doing. Look at the water. There is no blue paint that is simply water-coloured. There are dashes of green, of pale yellow, of violet, and the eye assembles them into moving water at viewing distance. The Art Institute describes it exactly this way in its own catalogue entry: small strokes of pure colour that add up to the effect of light on surfaces.

The red edge is the painting, not a border. Van Gogh worked on a canvas prepared with a red-brown ground, and along all four edges that ground is still bare where the paint stops. We print the canvas as the museum photographs it, so that reddish line runs around your print. It is not a frame we added and it is not a printing fault — it is the ground the picture was built on, and the shop's rule is that we reproduce and do not retouch.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the Art Institute of Chicago's own open-access photograph of the canvas. It is not a nineteenth-century painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 60 × 50.5 cm / 23.6 × 19.9 in — oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — reduced, 0.67× original. Image 40.27 × 33.60 cm.
70 × 50 cm / 27.6 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.84× original. Image 50.34 × 42.00 cm.

Provenance
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), Fishing in Spring, the Pont de Clichy (Asnières), 1887.
Oil on canvas; 50.5 × 60 cm.
Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Charles Deering McCormick, Brooks McCormick and Roger McCormick, acc. no. 1965.1169.
From the artist's sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger to Cornelis Hoogendijk, The Hague; through family collections in Amsterdam and Switzerland; Knoedler & Co. to Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick, Chicago, May 1947; given to the Art Institute in 1965.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph under CC0.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.