Vincent van Gogh
In November 1887 Van Gogh organised an exhibition in this cheap restaurant, showing his own work with Anquetin, Bernard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Koning and Guillaumin. Seurat and Gauguin came to see it.
Grand Bouillon-Restaurant du Chalet, 43 avenue de Clichy
Standing, much changed
Outside only
Someone else
The cheap eating-house where Vincent van Gogh hung an exhibition of his own work and his friends' in November 1887 — the show at which Seurat and Gauguin turned up, and where the road to Arles effectively begins.
- 43 avenue de Clichy, 75017 Paris
- A cheap bouillon restaurant; site of Van Gogh's exhibition of November 1887
The place, briefly
A bouillon was a cheap restaurant serving broth and plain food to working people. In November 1887 Vincent van Gogh, unable to interest a dealer in himself or anyone he liked, borrowed the walls of one on the avenue de Clichy and hung an exhibition.
He showed his own canvases alongside Louis Anquetin, Émile Bernard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Arnold Koning and Armand Guillaumin. He called the group the Painters of the Petit Boulevard — the small boulevards of the outer, poorer districts, as against the Grand Boulevard where Theo's gallery sold Monet and Degas. It was a joke and a manifesto at once.
Georges Seurat came to see it. So did Paul Gauguin, and that is the meeting that matters: the acquaintance formed around this show is the one that would take Gauguin to Arles a year later, to the Yellow House, the nine weeks of working together, and the catastrophe that ended them.
Very little was sold. The restaurant's proprietor is said to have fallen out with Vincent and the pictures came down. Nothing on the avenue records any of it.
Key facts
- A cheap bouillon restaurant
- November 1887, organised by Van Gogh
- Van Gogh, Anquetin, Bernard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Koning, Guillaumin
- The Painters of the Petit Boulevard
- Georges Seurat and Paul Gauguin
- Van Gogh and Gauguin's acquaintance leads from here to Arles
- Gone and unmarked
Timeline
Van Gogh hangs the Petit Boulevard exhibition here in November; Seurat and Gauguin visit.
Van Gogh leaves for Arles in February; Gauguin joins him there in October.
On the map
Questions before you go
Where did Van Gogh exhibit in Paris?
He could not get a dealer, so in November 1887 he hung a show in a cheap restaurant at 43 avenue de Clichy, with Anquetin, Bernard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Koning and Guillaumin.
What were the Painters of the Petit Boulevard?
Van Gogh's name for his own circle — the small outer boulevards of the poorer districts, set against the Grand Boulevard where the established Impressionists were sold.
Is this where Van Gogh met Gauguin?
Gauguin visited the exhibition, and the acquaintance formed around it led to Gauguin joining him in Arles in October 1888.
People who knew this place
Within walking distance
15 rue Nollet
A surviving private address in Batignolles where a vanished working people's hotel gave the young American poet Langston Hughes his real-life version of a Paris garret in 1924.
Visit the placeCafé Guerbois
The Batignolles café where Édouard Manet held court through the 1860s and the painters who would become the Impressionists argued out what they were doing. Its address has since been renamed and renumbered, and nothing of it survives.
Visit the place
Place de Clichy
The crossroads where four arrondissements collide — and where Louis-Ferdinand Céline opens Journey to the End of the Night at a café table, with a recruitment parade passing and his narrator Bardamu jumping up to join the war.
Visit the placeBrasserie Wepler
The big brasserie on the place de Clichy that Henry Miller used as his base during the Clichy years later recreated in Quiet Days in Clichy — somewhere to write, to wait for people, and to watch the square. Currently closed for renovation.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.