Le Moulin de la Galette

In the spring of 1886 Van Gogh turned up in Paris and moved in with his brother Theo in Montmartre, then still a half-rural hill of windmills and vegetable plots on the city's edge. He had come from Antwerp and the Netherlands, where his paintings were brown, heavy and dark. Paris changed that fast. This mill on the Butte, one of the old Montmartre windmills the locals had turned into a dance garden, he painted that first summer, and you can watch the shift happening, the palette lifting toward light and the brushwork loosening. Built in the 1620s, the mill had long stopped grinding grain and was selling views and galettes to Sunday crowds. Van Gogh painted it more than once in those Paris months, the country windmill hanging on inside the growing city.