Le Moulin de la Galette

When Van Gogh painted this in 1886, he had just arrived in Paris to live with his brother Theo, and his colors were only beginning to lighten after the dark years in Holland. The Moulin de la Galette was a windmill on the hill of Montmartre, then a half-rural district on the northern edge of the city. Ten years earlier Renoir had borrowed the same name for his glowing picture of a crowded Sunday dance held in its garden. Van Gogh looked instead at the plain structure, the wooden mill on its mound with a few small figures crossing the bare ground below. He painted it several times during that first year in Paris, drawn to one of the last old windmills still standing on the Montmartre hill.