Terraço e mirante do Moulin de Blute-Fin, Montmartre

Van Gogh painted this in 1887, about a year after he moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo, and his colours had begun to lighten under everything he was seeing there. The hill of Montmartre was still half rural then, dotted with old quarries, kitchen gardens and a few surviving windmills. This one, the Moulin de Blute-Fin, had stopped grinding grain and become a tourist spot, with a wooden observation deck built beside it for the view out over Paris. He lines up a row of lamp posts to pull the eye back toward it. Within a few years the open ground here would be paved over with streets and houses.