Ponds and Windmill, Hastings

James Stark's Ponds and Windmill, Hastings, like his Fish Ponds picture, belongs to his extended series of views near Hastings combining working landscape features with the local topography of the Sussex coast. The windmill was a subject with deep roots in Dutch seventeenth-century landscape — Ruisdael's Mill at Wijk being the iconic example — and for Stark, trained in the Dutch tradition via the Norwich School, windmill subjects had particular resonance. The combination of water and a working mill creates a landscape of productive rural life that reflects the early Victorian interest in the English countryside as both picturesque subject and document of a traditional economy under pressure from industrial change. Stark's Hastings subjects have value both as landscape paintings and as topographical records of a coastal landscape that has changed substantially since the 1820s and 1840s.

The windmill provides the vertical element that anchors the broad horizontal expanse of water and sky, its sails creating strong diagonal lines against the sky. Stark uses careful reflection to extend the compositional interest into the still pond surface. The palette is naturalistic, the handling detailed and controlled in the Norwich School manner.