About this work
The mill Van Gogh chose as his subject was a local landmark — popularly known as the *tabatière* or Jonquet — and he rendered it with a thick application of paint, exaggerated angles, and vibrant effects.
The composition positions the standing mill structure in the foreground, two figures to its left, and a broad mountainscape rising beyond.
A lapis-painted mountain range sits against a sea-foam sky , the whole scene pulsing with the saturated warmth of Provence. What commands attention first is the mill itself — its walls rendered in broken, sun-warmed tones that animate the stone rather than simply describe it. Van Gogh was inspired to use short, sharp strokes of the brush when painting foliage, while deploying longer strokes to create other parts of the image — a deliberate variation that gives the canvas an almost musical rhythm across its surface. The thickly applied oils display a wide range of brushstrokes and colours, considered to reflect the artist's feelings about the image rather than serve as a direct representation of the subject.
In February 1888, Van Gogh left the cold, dreary winter in Paris and moved to the town of Arles.
*The Old Mill* was one of more than two hundred paintings completed over fifteen months during his time there.
Van Gogh mentioned the painting in a letter to his brother Theo, sent from Arles on 12 September 1888 — a period of almost manic creative output in which he felt ideas coming to him faster than he could paint them. He undertook the work after moving into his Yellow House studio, and in October 1888, Gauguin arrived to join him there.
Upon completion, Van Gogh sent the painting to Émile Bernard in October 1888; Bernard traded it to Ernest de Chamaillard, who retained it until 1927.
It was acquired by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery of Buffalo, New York in 1966 , where it remains one of the defining works from Van Gogh's Arles period — a season that produced some of the most charged, sunlit paintings in the Western canon.
This is a painting that wants natural light and an unhurried wall. It suits a living room or study where afternoon sun can move across it — revealing, as the hour changes, how differently those lapis and sea-foam tones shift and breathe. The careful brushwork rewards close attention; you can clearly see where Van Gogh varied the direction of his paint to delineate different parts of the landscape. It speaks to viewers drawn not
