View on Monmartre

Painted in 1850 at the very beginning of Jongkind's French career, this view of Montmartre captures the hill village before Haussmann's transformations and the subsequent urbanisation that would make it one of Paris's most famous quartiers. In 1850 Montmartre was still a semi-rural commune on the northern edge of the city, characterised by windmills, market gardens, and modest houses scattered across a chalk hill. Jongkind, who had arrived from the Netherlands the previous decade, was finding his subjects in both the Dutch waterscapes he knew from home and the urban edges of Paris that retained a rural character. The canvas, held at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, is an early work showing the influence of his Dutch training — the elevated viewpoint, the broad sky, the emphasis on tonal unity — while demonstrating his developing sensitivity to French atmospheric conditions.

The elevated viewpoint allows Jongkind to compress the village into the middle ground while giving maximum space to the sky above and a foreground slope below. Paint handling in this early work is slightly more deliberate than his later canvases, with careful tonal relationships between the pale chalk ground and cloud-filled sky.