The Watermill
Meindert Hobbema·1685
Historical Context
This 1685 Watermill at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp was painted during Hobbema's later period, after his virtual retirement from full-time painting following his 1668 appointment as wine gauger. The relative rarity of late Hobbema works — he painted perhaps fifty paintings in the forty years after 1668, compared to his concentrated output in the decade before — gives surviving examples exceptional interest. His return to the watermill subject in 1685 demonstrates that his fundamental visual interests remained consistent across decades, the same basic composition of mill, millpond, and surrounding woodland rendered with the same technical approach he had developed in his productive years.
Technical Analysis
The watermill composition shows Hobbema's continued but somewhat diminished engagement with his favorite subject, the handling broader and less detailed than his masterful works of the 1660s.
