The Old Mill

The Old Mill at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is one of Van Gogh's most personally resonant Arles subjects: the old windmill on the hills above Arles was one of several mill structures he painted during his time in the city, and windmills carried deep nostalgic significance for someone raised in the flat Dutch landscape where they were ubiquitous. He had painted Dutch windmills repeatedly early in his career, finding in their mechanical forms against the sky a subject that combined the industrial and the natural, the human and the elemental. Finding windmills in Provence — surviving as picturesque remnants in a landscape where they had once served the same agricultural functions as their Dutch counterparts — created a bridge between his Dutch past and his southern present. The Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), recently renamed after a major expansion, holds one of the strongest collections of American and European modernism in the northeastern United States. The old mill in this collection sits among works that span the full range of modern art from the Impressionists through Abstract Expressionism, and the Van Gogh holds a central position in the museum's nineteenth-century European holdings.

The windmill is rendered with the same structural attention Van Gogh gave to other architectural subjects — its form observed specifically rather than generically. His warm Arles palette transforms the vernacular building through Mediterranean light. The surrounding landscape is handled with characteristic energy, the old mill providing a stable compositional anchor within the animated surroundings.