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.

At one time, many churches across northern Europe were constructed using load-bearing wooden posts termed staves, hence are known as stave churches. It’s thought that in Norway alone there used to be as many as two thousand. As they were built of wood rather than stone, fire was a danger, and between those that burned down and others that were replaced by more modern structures, there are now only thirty-one original stave churches remaining, all except three being in Norway. They have seldom been painted, and in this article I show paintings known to depict real churches from two Norwegian artists, and a relative from the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine.

JC Dahl’s Landscape in Kaupanger with a Stave Church from 1847 employs a little deception as the real church at Kaupanger had been modified structurally and looked quite different at the time. He therefore substituted the stave church at Vang, which had recently been dismantled.

Vang stave church had been built in the Middle Ages, and by 1832 was too small and in urgent need of structural repair. The local council had decided to demolish and replace it, and in 1839 JC Dahl intervened to save it. The artist bought the church at a public auction in 1841, and persuaded the then Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia to pay for the building’s removal, transportation and reconstruction in the remote village of Karpacz Górny in the Giant Mountains in Silesia. It has remained there ever since, serving a Polish Lutheran community, and attracts nearly a quarter of a million visitors each year.

The Norwegian artist Harriet Backer painted interiors of several Norwegian churches, including the stave church at Uvdal. This was built just after 1168, on the remains of an earlier church. It was expanded during the Middle Ages, and again in 1684, 1722 and 1819. Much of its internal decoration was undertaken in 1656, and extended as the building grew. It was taken out of regular use in 1893, and when Backer visited it services took place during the summer. It remains one of the finest decorated churches in northern Europe, and has been lovingly preserved.

Backer’s external view of Uvdal Church and Cemetery from 1906 is a faithful account of what from the outside looks quite a plain building. But once you get inside it, you enter another world.

Backer’s Uvdal Stave Church from 1909 does its rich decoration justice. Her brilliantly coloured view of the interior is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.

The Altar at Uvdal Stave Church, painted the same year, shows the altar from one side, with its painting of the Last Supper hanging above the table, and more decorative work over the walls and ceiling. These have been painstakingly restored in the years since.

Although externally they may appear similar, wooden churches in the Carpathian Mountain region of Ukraine and Poland are structurally distinct, as they don’t rely on staves, but are built from horizontal logs.

At the end of his training in Munich, Teodor Axentowicz paid his first visit to the lands of the Hutsul people, in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. His oil painting of a Hutsul Funeral from 1882 shows the Hutsul in the rigours of winter, the coffin being towed on a sledge behind a cart, and the mourners clutching candles as they make their way through the snow to the wooden tserkva in the distance.

Further reading

Stave church on Wikipedia
Uvdal Stave Church, Wikipedia
Tserkvas of the Carpathians, Wikipedia.

With summer here at last, if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s time to head north away from the heat and spend a weekend exploring the fjords of Norway in the company of some of the nation’s great landscape artists. Today we’ll see the development of painting during the nineteenth century, then tomorrow we’ll conclude with the early twentieth century.

We start with the founding father of the golden age of painting in Norway, Johan Christian Claussen Dahl, who was born in Bergen, Norway.

In February 1827, Dahl painted one of the finest winter landscapes of a Norwegian fjord, Winter at Sognefjord. This is the largest and deepest of all the Norwegian fjords, shown deserted apart from a few crows gathered around the base of what appears to be a pinnacle of ice. This might be the famous Balder or Frithjof memorial stone at Leikanger.

Hans Gude was in the next generation, and in the earlier part of his career collaborated with fellow-countryman Adolph Tidemand.

Among the results of this collaboration are some of their most spectacular works, such as Bridal Journey in Hardanger (1848). Gude’s highly detailed and realistic landscape is set in the far south-west of Norway, in the region to the east of Bergen, where one of the world’s largest and most spectacular fjords carves its way from glacier to the sea.

Sandvik Fjord (1879) is Gude’s startlingly detailed depiction of a view from above Sandviken, now the northern suburbs of the Norwegian city of Bergen, looking to the west and the island of Askøy.

The most prolific of those who painted the fjords was Eilert Adelsteen Normann, who like many Norwegian artists of the century trained in Germany, in Düsseldorf. He was responsible for attracting many visitors to Norway, who bought his paintings, and in the early 1890s for helping Edvard Munch to success.

Normann’s From Romsdal Fjord, painted in 1875, is the earliest of his dated works that I have located. It shows the ninth longest fjord in Norway, carving its way through this huge mountain gorge. A small party of well-dressed people have arrived in small boats, for a picnic on a rock spit. A sailing boat is gliding slowly along the mirror surface of the water, and in the far distance is a steamer.

A couple of summers later, Normann returned to the same fjord and painted Romsdal Fjord (1877), using a similar formula for its staffage. Next to his signature, at the lower left, the artist states that this work was painted not in Norway but when he was back in Düsseldorf.

Munken gård in Esefjord was painted on the shore of this tributary to the mighty Sognefjord, in the south-west of Norway, near Normann’s summer cabin.

One of the regular passenger and cargo ferry services steams up an unidentified fjord in Normann’s The Steamship.

Sognefjord, Norway returns to Norway’s longest and deepest fjord, as it carves its way due east from the southern bulge of the coastline. This view features Normann’s favourite small craft, and the sky and rock have become very painterly.

Sognefjord is fed by meltwater from Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in continental Europe, and the Hurrungane mountain range, rising to its highest peak Store Skagastølstind, with an elevation of 2,405 metres (7,890 feet). Like several Norwegian mountains, that was first climbed by the English mountaineer William Cecil Slingsby, on 21 July 1876. Slingsby made many first ascents in Norway during his thirty-year climbing campaign there from 1872, and is often regarded as the father of Norwegian mountaineering.