Le Moulin de la Galette

When people hear Moulin de la Galette they usually picture Renoir's sunlit dance floor. This is the actual windmill it was named for, the Blute-Fin, a wooden mill from 1622 that still stood on the hill of Montmartre when Van Gogh climbed up to paint it in 1886. He had turned up in Paris that March, unannounced, and moved in with his brother Theo, an art dealer, in an apartment nearby. The city changed his painting almost at once. The dark, earthy colours he had brought from Holland began to lift and brighten as he met the Impressionists and their light. Montmartre was still half countryside then, with kitchen gardens and old mills among the new cafes, and he painted the working structure plainly, its sails and wooden gallery against a pale sky. It is the only painting by Van Gogh anywhere in Argentina, at the national museum in Buenos Aires.