Le Moulin de Blute-Fin

In 1886 Van Gogh moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo, and the hill of Montmartre was still half countryside, with a few old windmills standing above the growing city. He painted this one, the Blute-fin, with a crowd of small figures climbing to its viewing platform. The picture then had an odd second life. A Dutch collector, Dirk Hannema, bought it in 1975 and called it a Van Gogh, but Hannema had a habit of seeing lost masterpieces everywhere, so nobody believed him. Only later did laboratory analysis settle it: the pigments are exactly the ones Van Gogh used in the autumn of 1886, and beneath the paint lie the ruled perspective lines he drew on his Paris canvases.