This is one of the landscapes Vincent van Gogh painted in 1886 after moving to the Montmartre area of Paris. At the time he often went out onto the then still undeveloped side of the hill of Montmartre. The quarry in the foreground stood on the Rue Caulaincourt. Van Gogh faithfully reproduces the tops of the windmills as he would have seen them from this vantage point, protruding above the top of the hill.