Two mills
Jacob van Ruisdael·1660
Historical Context
Two Mills, painted around 1660 and now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg, depicts the windmills that were ubiquitous in the Dutch landscape and central to the Republic's economic life. Mills powered the sawing of imported Baltic timber into planks for shipbuilding, the grinding of grain into flour, the production of paper, and — most vitally — the pumping of water from reclaimed polder land. Van Ruisdael invested these functional structures with the pictorial grandeur they deserved, treating them as natural forms within a landscape rather than industrial infrastructure. The Strasbourg museum's Ruisdael holdings reflect the Alsatian region's cultural position between French and German collecting traditions, both of which prized Dutch Golden Age landscape painting highly throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Technical Analysis
The composition balances the two mill structures against a dynamic sky, with carefully observed water effects in the foreground. Van Ruisdael's technique renders the mills' wooden structures and mechanical details with precision while maintaining atmospheric unity.
Look Closer
- ◆The two mills' sails are at different angles, catching the mills at different points in their rotation — stopped motion made visible.
- ◆Reflections of both mills in the water below are elongated and slightly trembling, the water in gentle movement.
- ◆A barge moored near the mills connects their grinding function to the distribution network of Dutch waterways.
- ◆The paint on the mill buildings is coarser and more opaque than on the reflective water, distinguishing solid from liquid.
