Le Moulin de la Galette

Le Moulin de la Galette, painted in 1886 during Van Gogh's Paris years, depicts the famous Montmartre windmill and its associated dance hall that Renoir had made one of the icons of Impressionist painting in 1876. Van Gogh's version engages the same subject a decade later from a different angle and social register: where Renoir's canvas celebrated the bourgeois leisure of a Sunday afternoon dance, Van Gogh was more interested in the windmill as a surviving rural monument in the rapidly urbanising Montmartre landscape. He painted the Moulin de la Galette and its companions multiple times during his Paris years, using them as compositional anchors for views across the butte that combined the neighbourhood's agricultural past with its expanding present. The Museum Langmatt in Switzerland holds this canvas as part of a collection assembled by Sidney and Jenny Brown from the early twentieth century.

The composition is defined by strong vertical and diagonal lines — the windmill sails, rooftops, and walls — rendered in short, energetic strokes. Color is bolder and more varied than his Dutch work, with ochres, greens, and blues laid side by side in an early experiment with Impressionist broken-color technique.