RKD STUDIES

c. 1655; oak panel, 31.5 x 33.9 cm
Signed, bottom right: JvR (as monogram)

PROVENANCE
Bourgeois Bequest, 1811 (as Rembrandt); Britton 1813, p. 24, no. 246 (‘Drawing Room / no. 34, Windmill – Landscape [added in pencil: Ruysdael] P[anel] Rembrandt’; 1'11" x 2').

REFERENCES
Cat. 1817, p. 10, no. 171 (‘SECOND ROOM – East Side; A Landscape, with Windmill; Ruysdael’); Haydon 1817, p. 387, no. 171;¹ Cat. 1820, p. 10, no. 171; Patmore 1824a, p. 188, no. 159;² Patmore 1824b, pp. 37–9, no. 159;³ Cat. 1830, p. 12, no. 241; Smith 1829–42, vi (1835), p. 99, no. 315 (‘Worth 40 gs.’); Denning 1858, no. 241; not in Denning 1859; Sparkes 1876, p. 156, no. 241; Richter & Sparkes 1880, p. 146, no. 241 (‘Probably painted before Ruisdael left Harlem (1659)’);⁴ Havard & Sparkes 1885, p. 205, no. 241; Michel 1890b, p. 86;⁵ Richter & Sparkes 1892 and 1905, p. 44, no. 168; Ruskin 1897, ii, p. 205; HdG, iv, 1911, p. 57, no. 175 (Engl. edn 1912, pp. 60–61: ‘A fine early work, full of feeling, dating from about 1650–52. The horse in front was probably repainted by the artist himself’); Cook 1914, pp. 103–4, no. 168; Cook 1926, p. 97, no. 168; Simon 1927–30, p. 74, no. 175 (not by Ruisdael, perhaps 18th century); Rosenberg 1928, p. 79, no. 115; Cat. 1953, p. 35, no. 168; Paintings 1954, pp. 10, [60]; Stechow 1966, p. 198, note 48 (certainly not 18th century); Bachrach & Sandberg 1971, n.p., under no. 2 (Constable, now DPG657); Murray 1980a, p. 117;⁶ Murray 1980b, p. 26; Reynolds 1984, p. 242, under no. 32.44 (Constable); Moore 1988, pp. 52 (fig. 39), 75; Beresford 1998, p. 217; Slive 2001, p. 148, no. 131, p. 149, under no. 132; pp. 698–9 (ill.; mid-1650s); Slive 2005, pp. 30, 33–5, 264; Dejardin 2008, p. 23, fig. 17; Dejardin 2009b, pp. 70–71; Salomon 2010, pp. 20–21; Slive 2011, pp. 16–20, fig. 13; Jonker & Bergvelt 2016, pp. 216–19; Plomp 2020, pp. 55–6, fig. 47; Ram 2020, p. 170, no. 73; RKD, no. 284868: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/284868 (June 20, 2017)

EXHIBITIONS
London/Leeds 1947–53, n.p., no. 47 (A. Blunt; an early work, c. 1650–52);⁷ London 1952–3, p. 63, no. 315; Hove/Lincoln/Sudbury 1993, p. 49, no. 5; Houston/Louisville 1999–2000, pp. 190–91, no. 66 (D. Shawe-Taylor).

TECHNICAL NOTES
Oak panel with horizontal grain. The verso is slightly bevelled at the lower edge, and there is a stencilled inscription, ‘G.H.’, on the reverse. There is some blistering and flaking above the lower edge on the right of the water, and the blue sky is very thin in the upper right corner. Later additions in the form of a painted-out figure group in the centre left of the painting, a figure with a horse on the right-hand side and several blue spots in the foreground were removed during conservation in 1996. Previous recorded treatment: 1866, ‘revived’, revarnished; 1945, conserved (including varnish removal), Dr Hell; 1979, treated for blistering and flaking along the lower edge, National Maritime Museum, E. Hamilton-Eddy; 1996, technical analysis carried out, L. Sheldon; conserved, N. Ryder.

RELATED WORKS
1) Jacob van Ruisdael, Extensive Landscape with a View of Haarlem from the North-West (Overveen), c. 1660–70, black chalk and grey wash, 92 x 151 mm. RPK, RM, Amsterdam, RP-T-1961-43 [1]⁸
2) Rembrandt, View from the Dunes near Bloemendaal with the Estate of Saxenburg in the Foreground and Haarlem in the Background, c. 1651, pen in brown ink and pencil in brown and grey, 89 x 152 mm. BvB, Rotterdam, R 130.⁹
3) Dirck Eversen Lons, Seem Moolen (leather mill; one of a series of four), c. 1614–31, inscriptions, engraving, 205 (trimmed) x 168 mm. BM, London, 1868,0612.310 [2].¹⁰
4) Jacob van Ruisdael, A Windmill near Fields, monogrammed and dated 1646, panel, 49.5 x 68.5 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, O., Mr and Mrs William Marlatt Fund, 1967.19 [3].¹¹
5) Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape with Windmill, black chalk, 145 x 195 mm. Print Room, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, C 1280.¹²
6) Jacob van Ruisdael, Windmill and House near the Water, black chalk, 94 x 151 mm. Kunsthalle, Bremen (not seen since 1945).¹³
7) Jacob van Ruisdael, Windmill near a River and the Ruins of Egmond Abbey and the Buurkerk at Egmond-Binnen, panel, 31.2 x 33.4 cm. The Earl of Northbrook, London.¹⁴
8) Jacob van Ruisdael, Mill at Wijk bij Duurstede, signed Ruisdael, c. 1670, canvas, 83 × 101 cm. Van der Hoop Collection, City of Amsterdam, on loan to RM, Amsterdam, SK-C-211 [4].¹⁵
9) Abraham Bloteling after Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Hogesluis seen from the Utrecht Side (?), no. 1 (frontispiece) of the series Amstel-Gesichjes (Views of the Amstel), inscriptions, etching, 165 x 216 mm. RPK, RM, Amsterdam, RP-P-1921-425 [5].¹⁶
10) Copy: perhaps 18th-century English, panel, 16¾ x 21¾ in. (42.55 x 55.25 cm). Davis Collection, New York.¹⁷
11) Copy: John Constable, Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem, 1831, panel, 31.6 x 34 cm. DPG657 [6].¹⁸
12) Copy: Ralph Cockburn, Landscape, with a Windmill, c. 1816–1820, aquatint, 130 x 181 mm (Cockburn 1830, no. 40), DPG [7].¹⁹

Lent to the RA to be copied in 1830.

The handling and subject matter are typical of Ruisdael’s work in the mid-1650s. Two windmills are set against a dramatic sky, with a view of the church of St Bavo at Haarlem in the background. Slive considered that it did not correspond to topographical views of Haarlem, but there are several views from the dunes near Bloemendaal (to the west) and Overveen (to the north-west) where St Bavo is shown with closely set mills – for instance in a drawing by Ruisdael himself (Related works, no. 1) [1] and in one by Rembrandt (Related works, no. 2) – and there were windmills all around Haarlem. Pieter Biesboer considers that this is a view from the south-east: the mills are on the edge of low sand dunes, and in the foreground is a drainage creek; beyond is some peat land, beyond that are the treetops of the Haarlemmerhout (the forest at the southern end of Haarlem), and then St Bavo and the tower of the Bakenesserkerk. Next to the mills are piles of wood for the barrels with leach used in the bleaching fields (often depicted by Ruisdael), of which there were many near Haarlem to bleach the linen of Haarlem and Amsterdam households.²⁰

Artists took liberties when depicting landscapes, and that was certainly the case when they depicted windmills.²¹ The two windmills here are both grondzeilers (ground-sailers), a round and an eight-sided one (see also Related works, no. 3) [2], and both seem to be thatched.²² Windmills are one of Ruisdael’s characteristic subjects, although he painted many more waterfalls. In general Dutch painters were not as interested in windmills as a 21st-century (art-)historian might expect them to have been. Ruisdael began producing pictures of windmills from the start of his career, as can be seen, for example, in a painting in Cleveland of 1646 (Related works, no. 4) [3] and a roughly contemporary group of black chalk sketches now in Dresden. One of the latter shows a mill, of another type (wipmolen, a wip mill or hollow post mill), in the same position as the main one in DPG168 (Related works, no. 5). In another drawing the mill is an eight-sided ground-sailer like the second one here (Related works, no. 6).

In DPG168, as in many of his windmill scenes – most notably in the famous Mill at Wijk bij Duurstede, with yet another type of mill (Related works, no. 8) [4] – Ruisdael adopts a low viewpoint, magnifying the mills so that they dominate the landscape, and silhouetting them against a dramatic sky. Slive has commented that the handling and overall composition are similar to Ruisdael’s Windmill near a River and the Ruins of Egmond Abbey and the Buurkerk at Egmond-Binnen (Related works, no. 7), which shows an eight-sided mill.²³ Here, however, unlike those two pictures, brilliant sunlight breaks through to illuminate a sliver of the landscape, monumentalizing an everyday scene. In this monumentality and drama Ruisdael departed from his early models, his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael (c. 1600/1603–70) and Jan van Goyen (1596–1656).

DPG168 shows a landscape where windmills turn and people work. The choice of what is essentially an industrial landscape as a subject for painting is one of Ruisdael’s most important legacies, leading to Romanticism and its various 19th- and 20th-century descendants. As with all his works, it is difficult to decide whether the artist intended his picture to have an allegorical or symbolic meaning.²⁴ Windmills were very common in the Netherlands at the time – for grinding grain, for keeping water out of the polders, and for water management in general. They were often depicted in prints,²⁵ such as the Amstel Gesichjes, six picturesque views of the river Amstel by Abraham Bloteling after Jacob van Ruisdael probably made for tourists: in three of these prints mills feature prominently, especially in the frontispiece (Related works, no. 9) [5]. Today the windmill is an icon of the Netherlands, but in the 16th century windmills came to be given a wide range of meanings: as an icon of modern technology, as a symbol of the mind, of the fortune of man, of the evil world, or, in a more specifically Christian context, of the Eucharist and Redemption.²⁶ As Seymour Slive has repeatedly pointed out, however, given the objects featured in Ruisdael’s paintings, almost any composition could be interpreted as symbolic. In the case of DPG168, it is perhaps best to say that while some of Ruisdael’s contemporaries may have seen symbolism in it, others may not.

Given its dramatic nature it is not surprising that the picture should have attracted the attention of John Constable, who painted a copy in 1831 (Related works, no. 11) [6]. Constable visited the Gallery on 30 July 1830 with five other Royal Academicians, and chose the Ruisdael and five other paintings to copy in the Royal Academy school. He had long been interested in Ruisdael, writing in a letter of 4 February 1799 that ‘I shall begin painting as soon as I have the loan of a sweet little picture by Jacob Ruysdael to copy’.²⁷ Constable’s copy bears an inscription under a label that reads ‘… by John Constable RA f. 1831 from the original painting by J. Ruysdael in the Dulwich Gallery’. Desenfans and Bourgeois had assembled their collection precisely to enable such copying. In Constable’s day the windmill had become an icon of an almost vanished golden age, whereas in Ruisdael’s time it was a vital source of Dutch prosperity.

Parts of DPG168 had been overpainted, perhaps by Bourgeois. The overpainting was removed in 1996 (see Technical Notes), but the figures can still be seen in the Constable copy and in the print by Ralph Cockburn (1779–1820) [7].²⁸

DPG168
Jacob van Ruisdael
Landscape with windmills near Haarlem, c. 1655
Dulwich (Southwark), Dulwich Picture Gallery, inv./cat.nr. DPG168

1
Jacob van Ruisdael
Extensive Landscape with a View of Haarlem from the North-West (Overveen), c. 1665-1675
Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv./cat.nr. RP-T-1961-43

2
Dirk Eversen Lons
Leather-mill, 1614-1631
London (England), British Museum, inv./cat.nr. 1868,0612.310

3
Jacob van Ruisdael
Landscape with a windmill, dated 1646
Cleveland (Ohio), The Cleveland Museum of Art, inv./cat.nr. 67.19

4
Jacob van Ruisdael
Landscape with the mill near Wijk bij Duurstede, c. 1670
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv./cat.nr. SK-C-211

5
Abraham Bloteling after Jacob van Ruisdael
View of the Hogesluis from the Utrecht side, 1663 - 1692
Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, inv./cat.nr. RP-P-1921-425

6
John Constable
Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem, dated 1831
Dulwich (Southwark), Dulwich Picture Gallery, inv./cat.nr. DPG657

7
Ralph Cockburn after Jacob van Ruisdael
Landscape, with a windmill, 1816-1820
Dulwich (Southwark), Dulwich Picture Gallery