Montmartre: behind the Moulin de la Galette

Montmartre: Behind the Moulin de la Galette, painted in 1887 and now at the Van Gogh Museum, shows the area immediately behind the famous dance hall and windmill that had been celebrated by Renoir in his 1876 masterpiece. Van Gogh's version shows not the public pleasures of the dance hall but the private, working landscape behind it — allotment gardens, plots, and the mixed vegetation of an urban periphery. This deliberately unglamorous view of a celebrated Parisian site reflects Van Gogh's characteristic preference for the overlooked and ordinary over the picturesque and celebrated. The back side of the Moulin de la Galette was not a subject others chose to paint.

The composition looks away from the Moulin's famous frontage into the irregular landscape of gardens and plots that occupied the Butte's less-visited areas. Van Gogh renders this informal landscape with the fresh plein-air palette of his Paris period: varied greens, warm ochres, and pale blues. His brushwork is appropriately informal for the subject — varied marks responding to the different textures of garden plots, grass, and sky. The windmill structure visible in the composition provides the connection to the famous site.