煎饼磨坊

When Van Gogh lived with his brother Theo on the rue Lepic in 1886, this old windmill stood just up the hill in Montmartre, then still a half-rural edge of Paris. It was called the Blute-Fin, and its owners had turned it into an attraction, with a terrace and dance hall that drew Sunday crowds up from the city. Renoir had painted those crowds a decade earlier in a blaze of dappled light. Van Gogh, newly arrived from the Netherlands, painted the plain wooden mill itself from a nearby empty lot, on an ordinary grey day with a few small figures. You can watch his palette lifting here, the dark Dutch browns giving way to lighter, looser strokes as he took in what the Paris painters were doing. The windmill, built back in 1622, had long since stopped grinding flour.