Windmill at the Riverside

This 1657 Windmill at the Riverside at the Museum Bredius is an early Hobbema work incorporating the windmill alongside his more characteristic watermill subjects. The windmill was the iconic Dutch landscape element — used for draining polders, grinding grain, and sawing timber across the flat Netherlands — and its regular presence in the Dutch landscape made it a natural subject for any painter of Dutch scenery. Hobbema's version, early in his career, shows him experimenting with the motif before settling on the watermill as his primary focus. The Museum Bredius in The Hague preserves this alongside other Dutch Golden Age works in a collection that documents the full breadth of the tradition.

The windmill provides a vertical accent in the riverside composition, its dark silhouette against the sky contrasting with the lower, more detailed rendering of the surrounding vegetation and waterway.