Impasse des Deux Frères

Among Van Gogh's Montmartre urban subjects, the Impasse des Deux Frères — a dead-end alley in the quarter where he lived with Theo — represents his interest in the unglamorous back streets and byways of Paris that conventional Impressionist painting largely ignored in favour of boulevards and parks. He was drawn to the specific character of Montmartre's irregular street pattern, which retained something of an older, pre-Haussmann urban fabric even as the neighbourhood was being rapidly transformed. The dead-end street — the impasse — carried a mild irony for a painter who was in the midst of his own artistic reorientation, trying to find a way forward from his dark Dutch training through the competing attractions of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. His Paris street subjects complement the more famous flower studies and self-portraits by documenting the specific urban environment in which his transformation occurred. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The street's recession into the pictorial depth gives the composition a perspectival structure unusual in Van Gogh's Paris work, which more often favoured flat or shallow spatial organisation derived from Japanese prints. Buildings and pavement are painted with varied brushwork—structured strokes for architectural surfaces, looser marks for the sky and distance. The colour scheme is likely relatively muted compared to his flower still lifes, reflecting the grey tones of the urban environment.