The Hill of Montmartre with Stone Quarry

The Hill of Montmartre with Stone Quarry, painted in 1886 and now at the Rijksmuseum, depicts the semi-industrial landscape of Montmartre's northern slopes, where gypsum quarries created an unusual topography of raw earth and worked stone amid the increasingly urbanized neighborhood. Van Gogh was drawn to this aspect of Montmartre — neither fully rural nor fully urban, bearing the marks of industrial extraction alongside the windmills and gardens. The subject allowed him to combine his enduring interest in working landscapes with his current project of brightening his palette under Impressionist influence. It shows the Paris period in active transition.

The earthy yellows and ochres of the quarried stone provide the dominant chromatic character of the composition, modulated by the pale sky above and the darker tones of the hill's vegetation. Van Gogh's Paris-period technique is evident: the palette is brighter than his Dutch work but not yet the saturated intensity of his later southern phase. His handling of the quarried surfaces — the irregular cut faces, the pale stone dust — reflects genuine observation of the site. The composition descends from the high ground to the lower foreground with spatial confidence.