Paul Gauguin
The Vaugirard house Paul Gauguin moved his family into in the late 1870s, the first of his homes with a dedicated studio. He painted its interior in 1881.
8 rue Carcel
Still standing
Outside only
Someone else
The Vaugirard house Gauguin moved his family into in the late 1870s — the first of his homes with a studio in it, and the subject of the 1881 painting named after the street.
- 8 rue Carcel, 75015 Paris
- The Gauguin family home in Vaugirard, from the late 1870s
The place, briefly
By the late 1870s Paul Gauguin was doing well enough to move his growing family out to Vaugirard, then a quiet district on the south-western edge of the city, into a house with a garden and — decisively — a studio.
That studio is the hinge. Up to this point painting had been a weekend habit conducted around a job. A dedicated room in a family house is the physical form of an ambition getting serious, and the work from these years shows it: he was exhibiting with the Impressionists, learning directly from Pissarro, and painting his own domestic interior.
The 1881 canvas usually called Interior of the Painter's House, rue Carcel is the record of it — a bourgeois room with a piano, flowers and a figure, painted by a man who still had a salary and was about to lose it. Within two years the Bourse had crashed and this way of living was over.
The house number is not separately mapped, so the pin here marks the street.
Key facts
- From the late 1870s
- The first of his homes with a dedicated studio
- Interior of the Painter's House, rue Carcel (1881)
- Vaugirard, then on the city's south-western edge
- Street-level record; the exact house is not identified
Timeline
The family moves to Vaugirard, into a house with a studio.
Gauguin paints the interior of the house.
The market crash ends his income.
On the map
Questions before you go
What did Gauguin paint at the rue Carcel?
Among other things, the 1881 interior of his own house — a bourgeois room with a piano and flowers, painted while he was still a working stockbroker.
People who knew this place
Within walking distance
72 rue Fondary
The address of the Auberge de la Ferme, the small restaurant where George Orwell took his second Paris kitchen job in 1929 — the chaotic, filthy kitchen that fills the second half of Down and Out in Paris and London under the invented name "Auberge de Jehan Cottard". Identified by archival research in 2021.
Visit the placeLa Ruche, 2 passage de Dantzig
The circular studio building in Vaugirard — a wine rotunda from the 1900 Exposition rebuilt as cheap ateliers — where Marc Chagall lived from 1912 to 1914 alongside Modigliani, Soutine and Léger, and painted the pictures that made him.
Visit the placeCité Falguière
A narrow lane of nineteenth-century artists' studios in Vaugirard, worked in by Paul Gauguin and later by Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine — cheap, cold and almost unchanged.
Visit the place
5 Rue José-Maria-de-Heredia
Blaise Cendrars's final home — the ground-floor apartment in the 7th arrondissement he moved to in August 1959 and where he died on 21 January 1961.
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.