Vincent van Gogh's palette has at last…

Vincent van Gogh's palette has at last become colorful, his vision less traditional, and his tonalities lighter, as may be seen in his first paintings of Montmartre.

By the summer of 1887, he is painting in pure colors and using broken brushwork that is at times pointillistic.

Van Gogh counts among his new friends the painters he refers to as the “artists of the Petit Boulevard”—Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac, Émile Bernard, and Louis Anquetin—artists who are younger and less famous than the Impressionists.

Espousing a vision of creating a harmonious artistic community in which they will all live and work together, van Gogh organizes a group show of his and his friends' paintings at a Paris restaurant.

They often gather at Pére Tanguy's paint shop, where van Gogh regularly sees Gauguin.

Tanguy, who generously advances supplies to many young artists, occasionally displays van Gogh's paintings in his store window.

Van Gogh, who buys Japanese prints from the noted art dealer Siegfried Bing and studies them intensively, arranges an exhibition of Japanese woodcuts at a Paris café and makes a few “copies” after Japanese prints.

His own work takes on the stylized contours and expressive coloration of his Japanese examples.

In this year he paints at least ten self-portraits.