モンマルトルの風車

In early 1886 Van Gogh turned up in Paris to live with his brother Theo, who found them rooms halfway up the hill of Montmartre. The hill was still half countryside then, with old windmills standing above the city, and the sails here belong to the Blute-Fin, a mill from 1622 that a dance hall had grown up around. For a Dutchman the windmills were a piece of home. But something had shifted in how he painted them. Set beside the brown, earthbound canvases he had made back in the Netherlands, this one carries lighter, warmer colour, the first signs of what Paris and its Impressionist painters were doing to his eye. Within two years he would leave for the south and the full blaze of Arles.