PARIS – The signs hanging outside the apartment windows on Rue Lepic say A VENDRE. The listing says Vincent Van Gogh lived there from 1886 to 1888. In many cities, this would be a prime tourist attraction. In Paris, it is an apartment for sale. The city’s cultural soil is too rich to build a museum on every block where one belongs.
It was here that Van Gogh painted “View From Theo’s Apartment,” which is now on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, though the notion of a Van Gogh Museum would have seemed laughable at the time, and perhaps not even appealing to the artist: “To succeed you have to have ambition,” Vincent once wrote to his brother Theo, “and ambition seems absurd to me.”
