Van Gogh painted various subjects at Asnières in 1887 including parks, restaurants, factories, and riverside scenes. Renamed in 1968 as Asnières-sur-Seine, the location is about 6 kilometers from his apartment in Montmartre

Parisians at the time would take a short train ride to the area for boating, festivals and dances. Impressionist artists were attracted by the sceneries there: bridges over the Seine, boats on the river, the outdoor cafés, etc.

Van Gogh wrote to his sister Wilhelmina: "While painting at Asnières, I see more colors than I have ever seen before." At this time he began to shorten his brushstrokes, being influenced by Pointillism, a technique developed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in which small, non-overlapping dots of color are applied to form an image

Signac later mentioned about Van Gogh, "I would encounter him at Asnières and at Saint-Ouen. We painted together on the riverbanks, we lunched at roadside cafés and we returned to Paris on foot …... Van Gogh, wearing the blue overalls of a zinc worker, would have little dots of color on his shirtsleeves. Sticking quite close to me, he would be yelling, gesticulating and brandishing a large size-thirty, freshly painted canvas; in this way he would manage to polychrome both himself and the passers-by"

Bridges across the Seine at Asnières was painted in open air. The light yellow of the embankment and the bridge walls shows the effect of bright sunlight. The rippling water surface is mostly painted in short brushstrokes of light blue and white, but taints of yellow and orange on the lower left accentuate the reflections of the stone piers on the river. A woman figure dressed in pink and carrying a red parasol adds contrast and subtle colors