It is late June in 1887 when Vincent sets his easel below one of the few remaining windmills of Montmartre and paints the scene before him and up to the hilltop.  A darkening sky in thick gray and blue dashes backdrops the outlines of the Moulin Blute fin with another windmill’s sails at left center of the horizon.

In the foreground, using the angles of the fences to create depth, Vincent invites us up a path of yellows and earthen reds. He has lived in Paris for over a year and his former palette of northern harmonious browns has grown to include more color.  The windmill he paints no longer functions to grind grain, rather, it is visited for its majestic observation deck looking south toward Ile de la Cite and central Paris.

Vincent and Theo are living in Montmartre on Rue Lepic, just around the mill from where Vincent sets his easel. He creates this canvas from the view looking up to the mountaintop with the vegetable gardens used by Paris restaurants clustered before him.  Now in his late 30’s, Vincent is experimenting with brushstroke variation and the placement of complimentary colors seeking to heighten the effect of both simultaneously.

Vincent is pleased with this larger canvas and its companion piece looking back down the hill towards the suburbs of Clichy and Asnieres.  He and Theo decide to submit them and one other Paris painting for exhibition in the 1888 Salon des Independants.  The salons were large halls with walls covered in canvases and were where modern artists had their best chance of reaching a large and wealthy audience and their work might be purchased.

Vincent and his contemporaries were generally excluded from these higher end salons and in order to show new styles and theories in art, alternative and non-judged salons were held where Vincent, Seraut and Signac, Lautrec and Anquetin and the Pissarros could show their latest canvases, controversial as they were at the time.

Related items include a photograph and a canvas from the year before, both taken from a similar view as Vincent’s large canvas work in early summer of 1887.  There are also the other two paintings Vincent and Theo selected for the 1888 salon: First, the intended companion canvas of the vegetable gardens on the north side of the butte, Second, a stack of novels in bright colors and short brushstrokes on a table beside a rose in a vase. Vincent felt these three canvases nicely represented his work and learnings as an artist in Paris and his evolving methods to evoke emotional response in his viewing audience.

Vincent writes his brother Theo:

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To Theo. Paris, between about Saturday, 23 and about Monday, 25 July 1887.

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Vincent writes his brother just after arriving in Arles in the south of France:

To Theo. Arles, on or about Friday, 2 March 1888

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Painting, Oil on Canvas
Paris: June – July , 1887 (96 x 120 cm, size 60 Figure)
Stedelijk Museum
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Europe
F: 350, JH: 1245