Rooftops in Paris

Van Gogh's 1886 painting of Parisian rooftops, now at the National Gallery of Ireland, belongs to the elevated views he made from his lodgings in Montmartre, where the layered roofscape of Paris spread below and before him. The view from above — chimneys, zinc roofs, attic windows, the Haussmann-era regularities punctuated by older structures — was a subject uniquely available to those who lived in the upper floors of Montmartre's steep streets. Van Gogh painted several rooftop views during his Paris years, finding in the urban surface an equivalent to the field and meadow subjects he had loved in Holland.

The rooftop panorama is organized into horizontal registers of grey zinc, chimney stacks, and the pale Paris sky above. Van Gogh's evolving palette brings varied color to an apparently monochromatic urban subject — blue-grays of rooftops, warm ochres of brick, cool blue of sky. Paint is applied with the energy of his developing Parisian style.