Windmill on Montmartre

When Van Gogh arrived in Paris in the spring of 1886 and moved in with his brother Theo, their apartment sat on the slope of Montmartre, which was still half country then. The hill was topped with old windmills, the last of dozens that had once ground grain for the city, and by the 1880s the survivors had been turned into dance halls and terraces with a view. Van Gogh had just come from Holland, where his paintings were brown and heavy, full of peasants. Here, that autumn, he painted one of these windmills standing alone against the sky, already loosening his brush as he took in the lighter Paris manner around him. We cannot say much about its color, though, because the painting no longer exists. It burned in a fire in 1967, and survives only in old black-and-white photographs.