El Moulin de la Galette

When Van Gogh painted this he was living in Paris with his brother Theo, in an apartment on Montmartre only a short walk uphill from the windmill itself. Montmartre was still half countryside, and the Moulin de la Galette, built in the 1620s, was one of the last working mills on the hill, though its owners had turned the grounds into an open-air dance garden. Renoir had painted that dance a decade earlier, all sunlight and crowds. Van Gogh climbed up and painted the plain wooden mill on an ordinary day, laying the paint on so thickly that the sails and the small figures stand up off the surface. These two Paris years were when his colours began to lift out of the browns he had carried from the Netherlands.