Windmill

Windmill is a subject in art. The gallery holds 200 works in this subject in art, including works by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Jean Léon Gérôme and Claude Monet.

The windmill is one of the most enduring motifs in Western art, and its rise as a subject is inseparable from the technology itself. The horizontal or panemone windmill first appeared in Persia in the 9th century, and the vertical windmill — the form that would dominate the European imagination — emerged in northwestern Europe in the 12th century. As mills spread across the medieval and early modern countryside to grind grain, saw timber, and, crucially in the Low Countries, pump water from reclaimed land, they became fixtures of the worked landscape and, in time, of the painted one. By the 17th century the mill was less a curiosity than a defining feature of the terrain artists chose to depict.

It was Dutch Golden Age painting that turned the windmill into an icon. In a republic built on land reclamation and wind-driven industry, the mill read as a symbol of prosperity, ingenuity, and national identity, silhouetted against the vast skies that the flat polder afforded. Jacob van Ruisdael (c. 1628–1682), the era's pre-eminent landscapist, gave the theme its most monumental statement in The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede (c. 1668–1670, Rijksmuseum), where the mill towers over castle, church, and the River Lek beneath turbulent clouds. Rembrandt van Rijn treated the post mill dramatically in twilight in The Mill (1645–48), and Salomon van Ruysdael, Jan van Goyen, and Meindert Hobbema — Ruisdael's pupil — wove mills through their river views and panoramas.

Visually, the windmill offered painters a tall vertical accent in an otherwise horizontal scene, a pivot for light, weather, and reflection. The motif outlived the Golden Age: the 19th-century Hague School revived it, as in Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël's luminous A Windmill on a Polder Waterway, known as 'In the Month of July' (c. 1889), where Gabriël insisted Dutch land was "not grey." Most strikingly, the young Piet Mondrian painted mills repeatedly — including Oostzijdse Mill along the River Gein by Moonlight — before abstracting the form on his path toward De Stijl. From medieval engineering to modernist threshold, the windmill remained a touchstone of how landscape carries meaning.