After forging a successful career painting marine landscapes and exhibiting them as well as cityscapes in the Paris Salon, Frank Myers Boggs became a French citizen in 1923. Settling in Montmartre, a bohemian neighborhood in the north of Paris, he renders a lone figure walking up the winding Rue Lepic in this painting. The pronounced diagonal brushstrokes behind the walking figure and the directional lines on the street and clouds give his movements a sense of speed.

Boggs was connected with the neighborhood art world, including art dealer Theo Van Gogh, who lived in an apartment on this street with his brother for some time. Two of Boggs’s paintings are depicted on the wall in the background of Vincent’s portrait of Scottish art dealer Alexander Reid, reproduced here. Boggs inscribed one of these paintings to “my friend Vincent.”

Michael Harding, Class of ’20
Excerpt from “Impressionism: Translating the Modern World”

Frank Myers Boggs, (French, b. United States, 1855–1926), Paris, 1915, oil on wood panel, lent by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, Montgomery, Alabama; bequest of William Pelzer Arrington in memory of his mother, Ethel Pelzer Arrington.

Vincent Van Gogh, Portrait of Alexander Reid, ca. 1887, oil on canvas, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK.