Impasse des Deux Frères

Impasse des Deux Frères (1887), at the Van Gogh Museum, depicts a Montmartre backstreet—the kind of unpicturesque urban passage that Van Gogh was drawn to during his Paris period alongside the more conventionally scenic views of the city. He lived in Montmartre with Theo and used the neighbourhood's varied streetscapes as outdoor studio subjects, painting the same locations at different times of day and in different seasons. The impasse—a dead-end street—has a specific topographical character that appealed to his interest in the unglamorous, working-class corners of the city that tourists and Salon painters ignored.

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.