Landscape with a Windmill

Now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, this 1646 panel with a windmill represents Van der Neer working in a subject type as characteristic of Dutch landscape painting as the tulip is of Dutch still-life — the windmill against a Dutch sky. The windmill was simultaneously a utilitarian object, a symbol of Dutch ingenuity in reclaiming land from water, and a picturesque compositional element offering a strong vertical form against horizontal landscape. Van der Neer's version lacks the dramatic weather effects of his twilight specializations — this is likely a daytime scene — but already shows his attentiveness to sky and the quality of ambient light. The Hermitage collection, which acquired major Dutch Golden Age works in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, holds this panel as a representative example of the mid-century Dutch landscape tradition.

The windmill's sails provide compositional diagonals that animate an otherwise horizontal landscape structure. Van der Neer renders the sails' rotation — or arrested rotation — with attention to the perspective foreshortening of each sail arm depending on its position relative to the viewer. The mill structure itself is keyed dark against a lighter sky.