Street Scene in Montmartre

When Van Gogh painted this in 1887, Montmartre was not yet the tourist hill crowned by a white church. It was a half-rural edge of Paris, with vegetable plots, wooden fences and a few working windmills still turning above the rooftops. He was spending those two years with his brother Theo, and Paris was changing his eye. The dark browns he had brought from Holland were giving way to the lighter, broken colour he picked up from the Impressionists around him. A couple strolls arm in arm past a shabby fence, a mill behind them. The odd thing is how rarely anyone saw this. It stayed in a single private collection for more than a century, never shown in public, until it surfaced and sold in Paris in 2021 for 13.1 million euros.