Landscape with Windmills

Jan Brueghel's undated Landscape with Windmills, painted on copper and now at the Manchester Art Gallery, belongs to the large body of topographically generalized Low Countries landscapes that he produced for collectors across Europe. Manchester's collection, built largely in the Victorian period with manufacturing wealth, reflects the civic ambition of a city that prized European old master painting as cultural capital. Windmill landscapes had an almost symbolic weight for Flemish painters: the mill represented human mastery of natural forces — wind transformed into mechanical power — and the flat, wide landscape it inhabited was the defining feature of the land their culture had literally created by draining the sea. Brueghel's copper technique brings extraordinary delicacy to the mill's wooden sails and the reflective water surfaces.

Oil on copper; the copper's warm metallic tone contributes to the golden afternoon light that characterizes this work. Windmill sails are painted with enough perspective foreshortening to convey rotation, and the canal or river reflects the sky in smooth, carefully graduated horizontal strokes.