© Maja Smiejkowska/Reuters
© Photo illustration by The New York Times. Source photograph: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images, via Getty Images
In the first article of this pair looking at paintings of windmills, I covered traditional views up to the first of the pre-Impressionists. This article takes this account from around 1850 up to the period between the two World Wars. Although the development of steam power during the nineteenth century brought great changes to many industries, windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the century, and even then they only declined gradually until the Second World War.
Samuel Palmer’s Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they are being driven by the rising wind.
Windmill styles differ outside northern Europe. When Jean-Léon Gérôme travelled down the River Danube in about 1855, he claimed to have witnessed this moving scene of Recreation in a Russian Camp, Remembering Moldavia (1855). A group of Russian soldiers in low spirits is being uplifted by making music, under the direction of their superior. Gérôme has captured an atmosphere which few of his other paintings achieved: the marvellous light of the sky, the skein of geese on the wing, and the parade of windmills in the distance, all draw together with the soldiers in their sombre greatcoats.
The following year, JC Dahl’s Burning Windmill at Stege is an unusual fire-painting following a traditional sub-genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Although painted well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature.
During the winter of 1864, Johan Jongkind returned to the Netherlands, where he painted this Winter View with Skaters, which is more overtly pre-Impressionist.
Jongkind’s watercolour sketch of a Windmill at Antwerp of 1866 is even more painterly.
Claude Monet’s second visit to the Netherlands in 1874 ensured that The Windmill on the Onbekende Gracht, Amsterdam (1874) became a part of the history of Impressionism. This shows a windmill known as Het Land van Beloften, De Eendracht or De Binnen Tuchthuismolen, which was built in the late seventeenth century, and was moved from there to Utrecht just a couple of years after Monet painted it on the banks of the River Amstel.
Frits Thaulow’s painstakingly detailed View of Amerikavej in Copenhagen (1881) shows a windmill in the background, where it’s being used to provide power to the adjacent industrial site.
Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Ukrainian Landscape from 1882 shows one of the distinctive windmills on the elevated bank alongside a major river and its more populated floodplain to the right.
It may not have been Monet who first made the visual association between Dutch windmills and fields of tulips in flower, but his 1886 painting of Tulip Field in Holland must be its best-known depiction.
When Vincent van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886, he stayed with his brother Theo in Montmartre. He painted a series of marvellous views of the remaining windmills there, including the most famous of them all, Le Moulin de la Galette (1887), in whose gardens Renoir had painted his Bal du moulin de la Galette a decade earlier.
Paul Signac’s Rotterdam. The Windmill. The Canal. Morning (1906) is a Divisionist view of a windmill in the centre of this major port.
It was a Dutch painter who took windmills from Impressionism to the modernist styles of the twentieth century: Piet Mondrian.
Piet Mondrian’s gentle nocturne of Oostzijdse Mill on the River Gein by Moonlight from about 1903 is one of several views of windmills that he painted in Impressionist and post-Impressionist style.
When he started experimenting with vibrant colour and patterned brushstrokes in about 1908, this painting of a Mill in Sunlight marks his point of departure.
The Red Mill (1911) continues Mondrian’s move towards areas of flat colour. That year he left the windmills of Amsterdam and moved to Paris. To mark his move into the avant garde of that city, he dropped the second ‘a’ from his surname, going from Mondriaan to Mondrian. He became increasingly influenced by Georges Bracque and the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso, and the purely abstract paintings for which he remains well-known today.
Serhii Svitoslavskyi’s Ukrainian Landscape with Windmills, probably from about 1911, shows a small cluster of windmills with grazing livestock.
By the end of the First World War, milling grain had become more centralised, and the hundreds of thousands of small windmills across northern Europe lost their business. A few have been preserved, and some are still used for specialist products such as stoneground flour. But the unmistakable sight of a windmill on the skyline had been lost from much of the land.
During the 1930s, the Raviliouses started spending time in Sussex, where they became close friends with Peggy Angus, whose house The Furlongs at Beddingham, East Sussex, became a second home. Eric Ravilious became particularly fond of painting the chalk downs there, as in his Windmill (1934). This isn’t a windmill in the traditional sense, but a smaller wind-driven pump to extract water from the chalk, mainly for irrigation.
© Timo Lenzen
丢了一批人物标签给 AI 写人物小传，让它模仿某位小说家的笔法，来给演员交代角色。
你觉得这像谁的手笔？
————
南方的空气里常常有潮湿的味道，像是雨下过以后残留的影子，久久不散。城市白天拥挤喧嚣，夜晚却显得空旷，好像光亮突然被抽走，留下无数未完的句子。在这样的环境里，一个男人行走。他的脚步从不急躁，像对时间有着自己的节奏感，和别人不太一样。
年少的时候，他把自己交给了工业设计。形状、光影、比例，这些东西比人群更让他安心。六年在公司，十年在创业，那些日子像一张张被翻阅过的旧画册，色彩褪去了，但线条还在。产品的生与死，像车站里人群的来去。大多数人只看见成功或失败，他却更在意其中被忽略的细节。
别人眼中的他冷静得过分，总是习惯提前几步想好方向，就像棋局上的布局。但在那层冷静的外壳下，常常闪现一些不合逻辑的柔软时刻。比如一段旋律，随便一盏灯的影子，甚至一个不经意的眼神，足以让他停下手里的笔。理性和浪漫在心里不停打架，谁也没有赢过谁。
他知道自己带着黑暗生活。抑郁的日子像一条看不见的走廊，没有尽头。他学会了靠药物维持稳定，像有人随身带着一块怀表，偶尔瞥一眼，提醒自己仍然存在。那段经历让他对痛苦格外敏感，也让他在与人相处时多了一层隐秘的温柔。他不会轻易表现出来，但在内心深处，对别人的脆弱始终心知肚明。
夜晚经常独自坐在桌前，电脑屏幕的光照在脸上，桌上散落着草图和未完成的文字。那些想法有时像城市里的霓虹一样闪烁不定，无法全部抓住。他清楚其中大部分不会被记住，就像梦醒时遗落的片段。但仍旧一遍一遍画下去，像一种执念，也像是一种呼吸。
在喧闹的城市里，他习惯保持慢半拍的步伐。人群汹涌，他的节奏却像潜水时的心跳，缓慢、克制，不慌不忙。他看似与周围保持着距离，其实心里始终怀有一种模糊的渴望——不是要成为谁，也不是要得到什么，而是想在梦与现实之间找到某种入口。梦与梦之间，总有裂缝。裂缝里偶尔透进光。
对很多人来说，他是个不好接近的人。但真正靠近以后会发现，那些冷漠与安静只是表层，像水面下覆盖着的冰。深处的水仍然温热，流动着。理性、浪漫、痛苦和温柔同时存在，没有谁能完全把它们分开。
这样的人物，像一个在现实里造梦的旅人。他的路从不喧哗，却留下清晰的痕迹。
（*正文及标题均由 AI 完成）
© Keith Bradsher/The New York Times
© Max Miechowski for The New York Times
© Matt Slocum/Associated Press
© Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times
© Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
© Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
© Lauren Petracca for The New York Times
Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.
1: Well-guarded like West Berlin was, it holds your greatest secrets.
2: Motor nerve processes your images.
3: Cloth or worsted to connect it all together.
To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.
I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.
Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.
© Jason Andrew for The New York Times
© Ryan David Brown for The New York Times
© Brett Carlsen for The New York Times
© Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
© DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times
Login
