Moulins en Hollande

Moulins en Hollande (Windmills in Holland), painted in 1907 during Luce's travels to the Netherlands, depicts the iconic Dutch windmills along a flat, wide landscape — one of the most recognizable subjects of Dutch visual culture. Luce visited the Netherlands on at least two documented trips in 1907–1908, producing paintings of Rotterdam's port and industrial canal areas alongside more conventionally picturesque subjects like windmills. His engagement with Holland reflects a broader pattern in French Post-Impressionist practice: the Netherlands had been a major site of artistic tourism since the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age was first recognized as the foundation of northern European realism. For Luce, the flat Dutch landscape with its enormous skies also presented distinctive challenges and opportunities: the sky dominates the composition in a way unusual for his Paris and Mediterranean subjects, and the horizontal geometry of polders, canals, and mills demanded a different compositional approach. The windmill paintings belong to the same Dutch trip that produced his Rotterdam nocturnes and industrial canal scenes.

The flat Dutch landscape is organized around a dominant sky occupying the upper two-thirds of the canvas, with the windmills and low horizon establishing the characteristic proportions of Netherlandish landscape painting. Luce uses horizontal strokes in the sky and water passages to reinforce the expansive horizontality of the terrain.