Apartment · Vaugirard (15th) · 15e arrondissement

Cité Falguière

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowSomeone else

A narrow private alley of purpose-built artists' studios. The buildings survive and remain in use; they are not open to the public.

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.

Address: Cité Falguière, 75015 Paris
Years: Artists' studios from the 1860s onwards

The place, briefly

The Cité Falguière is a short private alley of purpose-built ateliers put up in the 1860s, when this part of the 15th was still cheap and half-industrial. Studios like these — high north windows, no comfort, low rent — are the physical precondition for most of what is now called the École de Paris.

Paul Gauguin worked here. So, a generation later, did Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine, both of whom lived in the alley in genuine poverty in the years before and during the First World War.

What makes it unusual is how little has happened to it. The alley has escaped the redevelopment that flattened Gauguin's rue Vercingétorix studio a kilometre away, and the buildings are still ateliers.

It is private. It can be looked into from the entrance and no further.

Key facts

What it is: A private alley of purpose-built artists' studios, from the 1860s
Who worked here: Paul Gauguin, later Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine
Condition: Largely unredeveloped and still in use as studios
Access: Private — visible from the entrance only

Timeline

1860s
The studios are built in what was then a cheap outer district.
1900s–1910s
Modigliani and Soutine work in the alley.

On the map

Questions before you go

Can you visit the Cité Falguière?

Not properly. It is a private alley of working studios; you can see into it from the entrance.

Who else worked there?

Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine both lived and worked in the alley in the years around the First World War.

People who knew this place

Paul Gauguin

French · Painter, Sculptor

Paul Gauguin worked in the studio alley at the Cite Falguiere in Vaugirard, later occupied by Amedeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine.

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