During van Gogh's first twelve months in Paris he absorbed a lot of information about modern art from the best of the avant-garde artists of the time, but in practice his work in 1886 and early 1887 varied little from his paintings in the Netherlands.

In the early 1887 he stayed with Émile Bernard and his parents in Asnières and the budding spring seemed to trigger an awakening within van Gogh where he experimented with the genres to develop his personal style.

With new techniques, van Gogh produced paintings evoked tenderness of couples taking a walk in the park or social commentary about the ways in which factories affected country life.

During 1886 he was introduced to Impressionist artists and their works, such as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.

[2] In 1887 Van Gogh continued to make important connections with other artists who he befriended and exchanged paintings with, such as Louis Anquetin, Émile Bernard, Armand Guillaumin, Lucien Pissarro and Signac.

[2] Having been introduced to Impressionism and Pointillism in Paris, van Gogh began experimenting with related techniques, first on a series of self-portraits before he moved on to larger, more complex compositions.

The works of ukiyo-e artists, Hiroshige and Hokusai greatly influenced van Gogh, both for the beautiful subject matter and the style of flat patterns of colors, without shadow.

[6] In the 19th century Parisians took a short train ride to Asnières for boating, including rowing meets; festivals; and the "unrestrained atmosphere" of its dances.

[5] Longing for tranquil settings,[6] van Gogh began to paint in Asnières in April 1887 where fellow artists Signac and Bernard lived.

[5] Also influenced by Pointillism, van Gogh modified his traditional style and used vivid color, shorter brushstrokes and perspective to engage the viewer.

Striking quite close to me, he would be yelling, gesticulating and brandishing a large size-thirty, freshly painted canvas; in this fashion he would manage to polychrome both himself and the passers-by.

[9] In 1885 Seurat made A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and used a technique of placing colored dots on a work which led a movement called "Neo-Impressionism", or "Divisionism" and "Pointillism".

Van Gogh was one of the artists later called "Post-Impressionists" who was influenced by Seurat's style[15] that rejected realism and idealism to create a new genre based upon abstraction and simplicity.

Van Gogh learned from Seurat the beauty in simplicity and a means to convey messages in a more optimistic, light way than was his work in the Netherlands.

In the foreground three men sit at a table, one of whom is wearing a blue shirt and yellow straw hat, that Paul Signac finds is suggestive of the artist himself.

Paul van der Grijp, author of Art and Exoticism: An Anthropology of the Yearning for Authenticity, wrote of van Gogh's intention to portray his message of concern, "In his representations of the city he mainly paid attention to the expanding outskirts which swallowed up the countryside, whereby city and country life were often juxtaposed, sometimes in the form of trains for factories blotting the countryside.

[21] Factories at Asnières is a modern landscape depicting industrial growth as it takes over rural plains, a phenomenon called by some "banlieue" or "terrain vague".

Van Gogh has used horizontal bands to deliberately depict the earthy hues and movement of the field in contrast to the solid, carefully drawn geometric shapes of the factories and chimneys.

The painting seems to illustrate a line from one of van Gogh's favorite novels, L'Assommoir by Émile Zola: "a great forest of factory chimneys" filled the sky.

The topic had been picked up by Impressionists, such as Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet and Armand Guillaumin, but van Gogh may have been most intrigued by a work he saw at the 1886 Société des Artistes Indépendants by Charles Angrand entitled Terrains Vagues.

[25] Van Gogh was identified as one of the first, with other Impressionist and post-Impressionist painters, to depict industrial landscapes such as The Factory at Asnières (F318) Armand Guillaumin's Sunset at Ivry made in 1873 is another example.