Le Moulin de la Galette

When Van Gogh climbed to his brother Theo's flat on the rue Lepic in 1886, this old windmill stood almost at his door, up on the hill of Montmartre. Called the Moulin de la Galette, it had long stopped grinding grain and become a dance hall with a terrace looking out over Paris. He had reached the city only that spring, straight from the brown Dutch villages where he had painted peasants eating in near-darkness. Paris undid that. Here the palette has lifted, the strokes have broken apart, and the pale Montmartre light plays over the sails and the wooden gallery. He painted this mill over and over that year, one of a whole series he made of the windmills on the butte.