Landscape with a Windmill

Landscape with a Windmill, painted in 1852 and held in Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, places a windmill within the kind of open pastoral landscape Cox painted throughout his career — a subject that connected him, perhaps intentionally, to the Dutch landscape tradition of Ruisdael and Rembrandt's school in which windmills are essential elements of the flat northern European countryside. Cox had studied Dutch and Flemish painting extensively in his early career, and the windmill's compositional function — a strong vertical accent in a horizontal landscape — was well understood by him. Glasgow's museums hold an important Victorian British collection, the city's industrial-era wealth having supported systematic acquisition of landscape and genre painting. The 1852 date clusters this with Cox's other works from his most productive late years, when his atmospheric handling was at its most confident and his compositional instincts most assured.

The windmill's sails, if turning, gave Cox moving elements to add to his characteristic wind-animated landscape. His rendering of the mill's wooden structure shows the same attention to weathered surfaces he brought to cottage and barn subjects, while the sails' angular geometry provided a compositional element unlike any natural form. The mill's reflection in adjacent water, if present, would have extended his treatment of reflective surfaces.