Windmills near Rotterdam

Windmills near Rotterdam, painted in 1857, captures one of the most potent symbols of the Dutch landscape in a moment before industrialization began its transformation of the polder waterscape. Jongkind was living and working primarily in Paris by this date but maintained ties to the Netherlands and periodically returned to paint the Dutch subjects that gave his work its particular identity. Windmills had been central to Dutch landscape imagery since the seventeenth century — their functional importance for drainage and grain-milling made them omnipresent features of the waterway landscape, and artists from Rembrandt onward had treated them as natural compositional anchors. Jongkind's version is atmospheric rather than documentary — the mills function as vertical punctuation in a horizontal landscape dominated by the reflection of sky in the canal's surface. The Rijksmuseum holds this canvas.

The composition relies on the mills' vertical forms breaking the horizontal polder landscape. Jongkind's handling of the sky is characteristically free, with broad strokes suggesting cloud movement. The canal or polder water in the foreground reflects the sky, creating the mirror-effect that was a compositional signature of his Dutch landscape work.