View of Paris from Vincent's Room in the Rue Lepic

Van Gogh's View of Paris from his Room in the Rue Lepic (1887) documents his Paris period from a directly personal viewpoint — looking out from the window of the apartment he shared with his brother Theo in Montmartre. The view encompassed Parisian rooftops, chimney pots, and the distant city, subjects that Van Gogh rendered with the Impressionist-influenced palette he was rapidly assimilating through his contacts with Degas, Pissarro, and Seurat. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds this work among hundreds of others from his development period in Paris, which proved essential to his later achievement.

The Paris roofscape is painted with the broken, varied brushwork Van Gogh was absorbing from the Impressionists — different stroke directions for sky, rooftops, and chimneys, with a cooler, more diffuse palette than his later Arles work. The composition is informal and observational, the spontaneity of a painter exploring his immediate visual environment.