When Vincent van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886, he found himself on the edge of a revolution in art—and on the literal edge of the city, in Montmartre. At that time, Montmartre was still a patchwork of windmills, gardens, and vegetable plots, perched above the city’s haze. This painting, The Hill of Montmartre, is one of a small group of scenes he made in his first Parisian months, before the district became synonymous with nightlife and cabarets.

It captures a fleeting moment: the last breath of rural Montmartre before urbanization swept it away. In The Hill of Montmartre, van Gogh fixes his gaze on the gentle slope dotted with wooden fences, cottages, and the distant sails of a windmill. The time is late winter or early spring, when the earth is bare but the air is bright. A few figures trudge along a muddy path, dwarfed by the open sky and the rising hill.

The brushwork is careful, more restrained than his later, feverish style; the palette is earthy, with soft greens and browns under a pale, washed sky. Unlike Claude Monet's bustling, sunlit Montmartre scenes, van Gogh’s version is quieter, almost contemplative, hinting at both the isolation and the promise he felt in his new surroundings. The exact medium of The Hill of Montmartre is not always recorded, but it is likely oil on canvas or board, as was typical for van Gogh in this period. The painting’s early history is not well documented, but works from this Paris phase often remained with the artist or his brother, Theo, until after van Gogh’s death.

Today, this painting is valued as a key step in van Gogh’s transformation: here he first encountered the Impressionists, and his palette began to lighten, his compositions to open. The Hill of Montmartre stands as a record of a vanished landscape and a pivotal moment in van Gogh’s artistic journey.