|
Catalogue numbers: F 227, JH 1170.
During his sojourn in The Hague van Gogh had tried to represent a modern city as it changed and expanded. His attention was focused on the uneven edges where town and country met, often awkwardly: straggling housing developments, iron-rolling mills in meadows beside windmills, new streets, as yet unbuilt, marked out by lamp-posts. In Paris van Gogh explored similar aspects of that phenomenon, and in doing so he shared the concerns of the first generation of Impressionists. But they had portrayed the leisure-places in the fast-growing suburbs as well as Paris itself - Montmartre for instance. Van Gogh lived in Montmartre, just below the famous Moulin de la Galette (then a dance-hall), and this detail of one of his initial paintings of the mill shows the urban face of Montmartre. He also painted a Montmartre that was still rural, the place of stone quarries, market gardens and windmills. The broad handling and dull palette are reminiscent of his Nuenen work. The figures are just silhouettes composed of slicks of paint. None the less, one can still glean from this abbreviated figure notation the mixed social composition of the Montmartre street scene - a bourgeois, a workman, some fashionably dressed ladies.
|
