Huertos en Montmartre

When people picture Montmartre they think of cabarets and nightlife, but in 1887 the top of the hill was still half countryside. Van Gogh was living just below it, sharing an apartment with his brother Theo on the rue Lepic, and he walked up to paint what was actually there: fenced vegetable plots that grew spinach, lettuce and cabbage for the Paris markets, with people bent over their allotments and old windmills on the ridge behind. He had arrived in the city two years earlier painting in dark Dutch browns, and here you can watch the light get into his work, the brushwork loosening under the Impressionists he had just met. The slope he shows is a working one, all fences and vegetables and windmills, still feeding the city below.