View of Paris from Montmartre

Van Gogh's 1886 view of Paris from Montmartre, now in the Kunstmuseum Basel, belongs to the panoramic city views he made during his Paris years from the elevated ground of the Montmartre hill. The city spread out below — its rooftops, chimneys, the Seine's glint, and the horizon of the Île-de-France — gave him a subject fundamentally different from anything in his Dutch experience. Paris from Montmartre was itself a Romantic subject going back decades in French painting, but Van Gogh brings to it the specific light conditions and palette of his Impressionist evolution. The Basel museum's version shows the city in a characteristically atmospheric light.

The panoramic composition captures Paris spread across the middle and far distance, the foreground occupied by the slopes and buildings of Montmartre. Van Gogh's palette is lighter and more varied than his Nuenen period, reflecting his Parisian evolution. Atmospheric perspective dissolves the distant city in haze, while closer buildings are rendered more specifically.