The mill on the hill, 1886

The record dates The Moulin de la Galette to 1886, the first Paris year. The catalogue holds six painted works whose titles name the Moulin de la Galette, five of them dated 1886 and one 1887 — a concentration matched in these years only by the Montmartre views around it. The windmill was a few minutes from where the painter was living in Paris, and the record shows him painting it repeatedly across a single year.

What the record gives

The canvas measures 38 x 46.5 cm, a small horizontal, and it is held by the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin — the only one of the six Moulin canvases in this catalogue to be held in Germany; the others are recorded in Glasgow, Buenos Aires and elsewhere. The measured palette returns red as the dominant family, which is uncommon: red is a dominant family in thirty of the 610 works in this catalogue.

A Dutch subject in a French city

There is a coincidence in the record worth naming without over-reading it. The Nuenen years here include a mill at Gennep and a village tower; the first Paris year produces six pictures of a windmill on Montmartre. The motif carried over even as the location changed, which is the sort of continuity a chronology arranged by place makes visible.