Mills and vegetable gardens

Most visitors imagine Montmartre as a lively hillside packed with cafes and artists, but Van Gogh painted a very different version in 1887. Back then the hill was a working landscape, scattered with old windmills and small vegetable gardens tended by ordinary people. He was living nearby with his brother Theo at the time and liked to climb up to these green plots to paint. A worker stoops over the soil on the left, wooden fences run through the scene, and the weathered mills rise against a hazy, pale sky.

The painting quietly records a place on the edge of disappearing. Those mills already belonged to a fading era, and the growing city was inching closer with every passing year. Van Gogh worked with fast, loose strokes here, mixing soft blues, gentle greens, and warm earthy browns into something light and breezy. His years in Paris were reshaping his art too, teaching him the brighter palette and freer touch that would later define his best known work. His simple signature, "Vincent," sits in the lower left corner, a small mark on a modest scene.