View of Montmartre with Quarry

View of Montmartre with Quarry (1886) at the Van Gogh Museum is among the most geologically specific of his Montmartre views — capturing not just the hillside's semi-rural character but the active quarrying of gypsum stone that was one of the butte's industrial activities before its transformation into an entertainment district. Montmartre's gypsum quarries had been active since the medieval period, giving Paris building material (the term 'plaster of Paris' derives from the Montmartre gypsum), and Van Gogh's interest in the quarry subject connects to his broader engagement with working-class industrial landscape. The quarry combined a geological subject — raw stone exposed by extraction — with a social one, and his treatment anticipated his later quarry paintings at Saint-Rémy. The Van Gogh Museum holds this as a specific document of Montmartre's industrial rather than bohemian identity.

The quarry's excavated forms provide unusual compositional material — terraced cuts into the hillside, the geometric marks of industrial extraction. Van Gogh's evolving Paris palette is visible, lighter than his Dutch period. The landscape is rendered with both observational specificity and a developing Impressionist approach to light.