Twilight, Before the Storm: Montmartre

Van Gogh came to Paris at the end of February 1886 and moved in with his brother Theo, and from that June the two of them were at 54 Rue Lepic, halfway up Montmartre. The hill was still half countryside then. Above the new apartment blocks there were kitchen gardens, quarries, a few surviving windmills and open ground where Parisians came out on Sundays, and the city was building over all of it year by year. He painted it over and over in his first months there, in the dark browns and greys he had brought with him from the Netherlands. This one is tiny, a piece of cardboard about the size of a postcard, caught with a storm coming on. Two of those windmills are still standing up there, the Blute-fin and the Radet. The rest came down.