Johannes Hendrik Weissenbruch, Landscape with a Windmill near Schiedam, 1873

by Atelier Liesjes

A vast Dutch sky takes up almost two-thirds of the picture: pale blue, with the occasional wisp of ivory-white clouds slowly drifting apart. Beneath it stretches a low-lying polder landscape, green with grey and yellowish patches, criss-crossed by a ditch which casts a dark reflection on the water in the bottom right-hand corner. To the right of centre stands a stone mill with a wooden platform, a tarred octagonal tower and four broad sails jutting out at an angle; at its base stands a man in dark clothing, a stick in his hand. Black-and-white cows graze in the meadow: one lies in the foreground on the left with its head in the grass, another stands in the centre foreground with its head lowered, and further away a few more animals lie scattered like small specks. The horizon is low and is framed by a dark line of trees and a solitary roof. Weissenbruch painted this landscape en plein air, with a loose, swift brushstroke and a thin, almost transparent layer of paint. The colours are cool and subdued: sage green and grey-green in the countryside, umber and almost black in the mill, ochre and off-white in the sky. The mill is not a romantic symbol but a working machine, firmly planted in the meadow, with the platform from which the miller could trim the sails. Yet there is a stillness about the scene that is typical of the Hague School: no narrative, no movement, only sky, water and light sweeping across the polder. It is a painting about space and atmosphere, in which the cloud formation is just as important as the land beneath it. Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch (The Hague 1824 – The Hague 1903) was one of the most important landscape painters of the Hague School. He was trained at the Hague Academy, admired Jacob van Ruisdael and preferred to paint polders, windmills and bodies of water in changing weather conditions, in both oil and watercolour.