54 Rue Lepic: Van Gogh's Paris Apartment
Why is it significant?
Find the plaque on the façade of number 54, an ordinary, respectable apartment building on a bend of rue Lepic.
Key Facts
| Place | 54 Rue Lepic: Van Gogh's Paris Apartment |
|---|---|
| Address | 54 Rue Lepic, 75018 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.88640, 2.33410 |
| Part of Walk | Painters, Windmills and Cancan: Montmartre, the Artists' Hill of Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the plaque on the façade of number 54, an ordinary, respectable apartment building on a bend of rue Lepic. From June 1886 to February 1888, on the third floor, lived two Dutch brothers: Theo van Gogh, a successful young art dealer, and his older brother Vincent, who had turned up in Paris almost without warning.
Vincent arrived with dark, earthy canvases of Dutch peasants painted in browns and greys. In Paris he discovered the Impressionists, Japanese prints and the young painters of his own generation. He studied for a while in the studio of Fernand Cormon, where he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard, and his palette exploded. In two years he painted more than two hundred pictures in Paris: flowers, still lifes, self-portraits because he could not afford models, and the view from this very building, across a sea of Paris rooftops.
Living with him was another matter. Vincent quarrelled with visitors, filled the flat with paint and canvases, and hardly slept. In a letter to their sister in 1887, Theo wrote that it was as if there were two people inside his brother: one marvellously gifted, tender and refined, the other selfish and hard-hearted. And yet Theo never stopped paying for his paint, his rent and his food.
Theo worked for the firm of Boussod, Valadon and Company and ran its gallery on boulevard Montmartre, where he quietly showed modern painters like Monet, Degas and Gauguin. Without him there would be no Vincent at all: the hundreds of letters between the two brothers are the reason we know so much about how Vincent thought and worked. In February 1888, worn out by the grey Paris winter, Vincent took the train south to Arles, looking for light. He never lived in Montmartre again.
Cross the street and count up to the third floor. Behind those windows a Dutch painter learned to see in colour... and among his Paris canvases were his first sunflowers. Now follow rue Lepic all the way down to the boulevard, turn right, and right again into the short avenue Rachel, which ends at the gate of a cemetery.