Outskirts of Paris near Montmartre

Catalogue numbers: F 1410, JH 1286.

This picture is painted in watercolour, with solid areas of colour and controlled graphic strokes. It depicts Paris seen at the edges. We see Paris across a frontier marked by a path which also represents the meeting of town and country. The ‘country’ fills almost half the picture, but this enlarged foreground, closest to us, is virtually empty except for a roofless cottage, some quarried stones, and some handcarts. The city, compressed into the middle ground, is dense, inhabited, busy. Factories smoke above and between packed houses and tenements. In the distance we see hills and another large stretch of countryside.

The picture demonstrates van Gogh’s conquest of the vocabulary of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting and its vision of the harmonious and hierarchical relations of town and country.