The Queen's Mill, Østervold

Gauguin's Queen's Mill at Østervold was painted during his Copenhagen stay of 1884–1885, a miserable winter exile with his wife Mette's Danish family. The windmill on the Østervold — a historic landmark in Copenhagen — gave him an architectural subject painted in the clear northern light of a Scandinavian winter. Working in Copenhagen without a dealer, without the Impressionist community, and without the chromatic stimulation of French subject matter, Gauguin produced relatively conventional topographic landscapes that reflect both his isolation and the directly Impressionist approach he was still pursuing before the formal breakthrough of the Pont-Aven years.

The windmill is rendered with topographic precision in the manner of Scandinavian academic landscape painting, which Gauguin was encountering in Copenhagen exhibitions. The light quality is noticeably cooler and greyer than the French Impressionist palette. Handling is competent but more restrained than his contemporaneous French work.