Le Moulin de la Galette

Van Gogh painted this in 1886, the year he left the Netherlands and turned up unannounced in Paris to live with his brother Theo in Montmartre. The Moulin de la Galette was one of the last working windmills on the hill, though its owners had by then turned the grounds into a popular open-air dance garden. He climbed up to paint the old mills several times that first year. The colors here are still the browns and grays he had brought from home, before the Paris Impressionists pulled his palette toward the bright, broken color of his later work. He gives the wooden mill and its scaffolding the plain, close attention of someone drawing a familiar farm building he has known for years.