Montmartre: mulini e orti

Today Montmartre means cafés, the white domes of Sacré-Coeur and crowds of tourists, but when van Gogh climbed its hill in 1887 the top was still half countryside. There were working windmills up there, and between them market gardeners grew vegetables in long plots to sell down in the city. This is the edge of Paris in the middle of being swallowed. Van Gogh, newly arrived from the Netherlands and living with his brother, painted the old mills again and again that year, trying out the lighter, broken brushwork he was picking up from the painters around him. The little wooden fences and kitchen plots here are the last of a rural Montmartre that was already being built over with streets and apartment blocks. Of the many windmills that once crowned the hill, only two still stand today.