The Blute-Fin Windmill, Montmartre

The son of a Dutch Protestant minister, Vincent van Gogh embarked on various careers - the art trade, teaching, the ministry and missionary work - before deciding around 1880 to become an artist. After brief periods of study in The Hague and later in Antwerp, despairing and poverty-stricken, he determined to travel to Paris to further his studies. He arrived in the French capital in early March 1886 where he stayed with his brother Theo, the manager of the boulevard Montmartre branch of the art-dealing firm Boussod & Valadon.

Encouraged and assisted by Theo, Vincent quickly set about learning all he could about contemporary art. He was particularly keen to learn about colour and figure painting. He was fortunate that two major exhibitions, the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition and Georges Petit's Fifth International, gave him the chance to study works by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissaro, Cézanne and Seurat. Vincent also visited dealers' galleries and artists' studios and, through the classes he attended at the atelier Cormon and through Theo met and became friendly with Gauguin, Bernard, Signac, Pissaro and Toulouse-Lautrec.

In June 1886 Vincent and Theo moved from the small room they had shared in the Rue Laval to larger lodgings in the Rue Lepic, in the heart of Montmartre, which in those days was still quite rural. There were three windmills on the top of the Butte surrounded by allotments and a few, rather tumbledown dwellings. The butte was a favoured haunt of pleasure-seeking Parisians because of its bars, pavement cafés, a dance hall and a park. Vincent made many drawings and paintings of the area, often directly from nature. One of these oils, The Blute-Fin Windmill, Montmartre, shows how much the Dutch artist had absorbed, during his stay in Paris, in a short space of time. Vincent's earlier works, painted in Holland, had been dark and heavy, but here - influenced by the paintings of the Impressionists - he begins to use a lighter palette and freer brushstrokes, capturing fleeting effects of light and movement. With just a few strokes of paint he conjures up the small figures on the terrace and the strong notes of colour of the French flags, fluttering in the breeze. In the foreground the broad, powerful brushstrokes, heavily laden with paint, suggest the tangled growth of the small allotments with a dance of two struggling sunflowers, in shade on the right and caught in sunshine on the left.

The view was painted from a vacant plot beside the Rue Lepic and shows the Moulin de Blute-Fin, a seventeenth-century grain-mill which, of the three windmills that remained on the butte, was the one Vincent would choose to paint most often. A second windmill, the Moulin à Poivre, can just be made out on the horizon on the extreme left. The Moulin de Blute-Fine was a popular tourist attraction as both the terrace on its roof and the belvedere in front afforded magnificent views of the city below.

This painting was purchased by William McInnes from the Scottish art dealer Alexander Reid, whose portrait by Van Gogh is also part of Glasgow Museums' collection.

Credit: Bequeathed by William McInnes, 1944