This series attempts to describe how European painting changed during the Dutch Golden Age, between about 1600-1672.

Provinces that united in the Dutch Republic are shown in red, orange and yellow in this map. Its centres of art included The Hague, its de facto capital, Utrecht, Leiden, Delft, Harlem, and Amsterdam. To the south were the lands composing the Spanish Netherlands, notably Flanders and Brabant, including the cities of Antwerp and Brussels.

Introduction

History

Painted fifty years before the dawn of the Golden Age, Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (1565) is a precursor to winter scenes of the Dutch Republic.

Origins
Life in the Republic
Historical context 1565-1643
Historical context 1644-1674
Decline and legacy
How did it happen?

Genres

Group portraits
Ordinary people

Still Life
Vanitas

Animal painting
Chiaroscuro in Utrecht
Stories

Landscapes

Cloudscapes
Nocturnes

Water
Mills

Winter

Individual artists

Troubled women of Paulus Bor

Everyday life of Gerard ter Borch
Aelbert Cuyp 1
Aelbert Cuyp 2
Jan Miense Molenaer

Rembrandt to 1640
Rembrandt after 1640
Jacob van Ruisdael’s trees

Johannes Vermeer 1
Johannes Vermeer 2
Unique imagery of Domenicus van Wijnen

Painted over a century after the end of the Golden Age, JMW Turner’s Fishermen at Sea (1796) is a direct descendant of the maritimes and nocturnes developed by the artists of the Dutch Republic.

The innumerable paintings of the Golden Age transformed European painting from the art of the Renaissance to prepare it for the Age of Enlightenment and the major changes of the nineteenth century. Art broke free from domination by religious themes and patronage by the church and ruling elites, with the opening up of secular genres including landscape painting.

Related articles

A Painted Weekend in Amsterdam: 1645-1867
A Painted Weekend in Amsterdam: 1871-1923
Interiors by Design: The Dutch Golden Age
Blur in paintings: Vermeer
Landscape composition: Dutch Horizons
Still Life History: 2 Clara Peeters the pioneer
Still Life History: 3 The Dutch Golden Age

Next to Rembrandt: In Memoriam Adriaen van der Werff 1
Next to Rembrandt: In Memoriam Adriaen van der Werff 2
Landscapes for All Reasons: Paintings of Aelbert Cuyp 1
Landscapes for All Reasons: Paintings of Aelbert Cuyp 2
Landscapes for All Reasons: Paintings of Aelbert Cuyp 3
The Making of Vermeer’s Milkmaid
Commemorating 300 years since the death of Jan Weenix
Distant panoramas: The 400th anniversary of Philip de Koninck 1
Distant panoramas: The 400th anniversary of Philip de Koninck 2
The Golden Home: 400th anniversary of Gerard ter Borch, 1
The Golden Home: 400th anniversary of Gerard ter Borch, 2
Adriaen van de Velde
The 400th anniversary of the birth of Paulus Potter

The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic developed as a result of a combination of circumstances, some of which are made clear in previous articles in this series. This summary brings those together with a small selection of works to illustrate them.

The Northern Renaissance, that had started in the Flemish countries to the south in the 1420s, had flourished in centres such as Antwerp and Brussels during the sixteenth century. As it matured into the Baroque during the early decades of the Golden Age, it was led by Peter Paul Rubens. This gained from the early adoption and development of oil painting on canvas using realist techniques to depict increasingly secular themes, which became centred in the workshops of Antwerp.

Flanders and Brabant in the south remained part of the Habsburg empire ruled from Spain, with intolerance towards Protestant movements leading to religious conflict. Some artists who trained in those countries migrated to the north, where they accelerated the growth of Dutch Golden Age painting.

Among them was Clara Peeters, who seems to have trained in Antwerp before painting innovative still lifes in the Dutch Republic. By about 1611, when she painted Mesa (Table) above, she was selling her paintings to the Spanish royal family. Some of her works ended up in the Spanish Royal Collection, and today remain in the Prado in Madrid as a result. Dutch painters developed her themes, and settings for meals, particularly that of breakfast, later became a sub-genre.

As a secular confederation of provinces, art in the republic wasn’t dominated by religious themes or the patronage of a royal dynasty. Commissions seldom came from religious organisations, but from guilds and other non-religious groups that were flourishing in the growing cities. Most popular among those were group portraits of occupational guilds.

Although guilds had been an important part of Renaissance society, few if any appear to have commissioned group portraits, which were largely confined to noble families. In 1617, Michiel van Mierevelt and his son Pieter, specialists in portraiture, painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer, one of the earliest portraits of a social group from the Dutch Golden Age. These are thought to be members of the Surgeons’ Guild of the city of Delft, who commissioned this work.

Among the groups responsible for many of these portrait commissions was the civil militia. Frans Hals’ Militia Company of District XI under the Command of Captain Reynier Reael (1633-37) shows a group known as the Meagre Company. He was commissioned to paint this in 1633, but three years later it remained unfinished, and the commission was transferred to Codde to complete the right side of the canvas and many of the hands and faces a year later.

Migration and international trade transformed cities like Amsterdam, which rapidly became multicultural at a time when much of Europe was still oppressing minority groups such as Jews.

Meindert Hobbema’s view of The Haarlem Lock, Amsterdam from 1663-65 shows one of the city’s working locks with a raising bridge, with the masts of many ships in the harbour beyond.

Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Skaters from 1608 shows the many who have spilled out from the warmth of buildings to take to the ice.

Berckheyde’s The Nieuwezijds Voorburgswal, Amsterdam from 1686 shows the canal running at the rear of Amsterdam’s City Hall, built between 1648-65, and featuring the octagonal tower seen at the right. By this time the population of Amsterdam had risen to more than 220,000, many of them immigrants.

With the growth of trade came increasing prosperity, and urban populations who became avid collectors. For some it was household linen or clothing, for others Delft tiles, and for the many who wanted to decorate the walls of their houses, paintings were ideal. Those artists who had achieved recognition could sell through art dealers, some of whom were painters themselves. For smaller and more everyday works, art fairs were held, and collectors flocked to attend them in search of bargains.

A Senior Merchant of the Dutch East India Company, painted during 1650-59, is thought to show Jacob Mathieusen and his wife, against a background of the company fleet in Batavia roads. This city in what was then the Dutch East Indies is now the site of Jakarta in Indonesia.

As more secular genres became popular, painters specialised in sub-genres in an effort to appeal to new markets.

In mid 1652, Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten seems to have witnessed the destruction by fire of part of the centre of Amsterdam, shown in his studio painting of The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam on Fire, 7 July 1652 (1652-55).

The sense of Smell, from 1637, is the best of Jan Miense Molenaer visual jokes, a thoroughly secular if not irreverent scene from everyday life.

The theme of witchcraft was explored in Domenicus van Wijnen’s Witches’ Sabbath by Moonlight, set in a moonlit Italian landscape. This combines many of the now-classical symbols associated with the Dark Arts, and is taking place at an outdoor altar set up at the foot of the gallows, on which a dead body hangs.

With the driving force in painting being removed from a royal family, and professional power resting with local guilds of Saint Luke, the republic avoided adopting a privileged academy system. Painters trained first as apprentices before demonstrating the skills expected of a master, so gaining admission to the guild. These too had originated in Flanders, with the foundation of Antwerp’s by 1382. Amsterdam led in 1579, and several other cities in the Dutch Republic followed from 1609.

Taken together, the main driving forces of Dutch Golden Age painting were a rich diversity in both society and painted themes, and the popularity of paintings among the republic’s citizens. As a result, visual art thrived.

This is the second article setting some of the finest paintings of the Golden Age in the context of major events in the history of the Dutch Republic, and resumes the account in 1644, shortly before the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

Constituents of the Dutch Republic are shown in red, orange and yellow in this map. Its centres of art included The Hague, its de facto capital, Utrecht, Leiden, Delft, Harlem, and Amsterdam. To the south were the lands composing the Spanish Netherlands, notably Flanders and Brabant, including the cities of Antwerp and Brussels.

1644-1659

1648 The Peace of Munster was ratified, ending the Thirty Years’ War and formally establishing the Dutch Republic as an independent country (see below).
1652 The United East India Company started settling Cape Colony, later known as the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa.
1652-54 The First Anglo-Dutch War, ended with the Treaty of Westminster.

Dutch landscape artists quickly realised that, even if they had relatively little earth and water to depict, the heavens above could be equally interesting. Horizons fell rapidly down their paintings, as seen in Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644.

Paulus Potter, who became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke in Delft in 1646, founded the new genre of animal painting in 1647 with his almost life-size portrait of The Bull (also widely known as The Young Bull). Originally intended as a portrait of just the central bull, Potter enlarged the canvas to accommodate (from the left) a ram, lamb, ewe, herdsman, cow, and above them a bird of prey, possibly a buzzard. Beyond them are more cattle in the meadows receding to the church of Rijswijk, between Delft and The Hague.

For the thirty years between 1618-1648, central Europe had been engulfed in a bitter war between the Habsburg states, including the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, and their enemies, including the Dutch Republic. Gerard ter Borch’s magnificent painting of The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648 (1648) recorded the moment that the Thirty Years’ War ended, with the ratification of this treaty between the Dutch Republic and Spain.

The son a of Flemish immigrant, David Bailly, who lived and worked in Leiden, painted this Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols in 1651, with its multiple portraits referring to the past. The figure shows him as a much younger man, holding the maulstick he used in painting. His actual self-portrait at the time is in the painting he is holding with his left hand. Next to that is a painting of his wife, who had already died, and a ghostly image of her is projected onto the wall behind the wine glass.

Long before its value in preventing scurvy was realised (in 1747), or it was carbonated even later, still cloudy lemonade had become a popular soft drink. The extensive trade links of the Dutch Republic made the drink available to the middle classes, as celebrated in Gerard ter Borch’s The Glass of Lemonade (1655-60).

In Vermeer’s celebrated The Milkmaid (c 1658-1661) the maid is pouring milk from a jug, beside a tabletop with bread. In the left foreground the bread and pots rest on a folded Dutch octagonal table, covered with a mid-blue cloth. A wicker basket of bread is nearest the viewer, broken and smaller pieces of different types of bread behind and towards the woman, in the centre. Behind the bread is a dark blue studded mug with pewter lid, and just in front of the woman a brown earthenware ‘Dutch oven’ pot into which she is pouring milk.

1660-1672

1664-71 The Second Anglo-Dutch War.
1669 The United East India Company was the largest and richest private company in the world, with more than 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, and its own private army of 10,000.
1672 The Third Anglo-Dutch War; the Dutch Republic was invaded by France and others, following which its economy went into decline and the art market collapsed.

Meindert Hobbema’s magnificent Watermill from about 1664 accommodates a family: the wife is out doing the washing in a barrel, while the husband and son walk through their garden. It’s also relatively unusual in that the water here is fed through the elevated wooden aqueducts, making this watermill overshot, so capable of generating more power with a lower flow of water, because it uses the weight of water falling against the blades of the waterwheel.

Some painters, including Jacob van Ruisdael, turned their canvases to make portraits of towering clouds, as in his View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields from about 1665. The distant town of Haarlem with its monumentally large church of Saint Bavo – works of man – is dwarfed by these high cumulus clouds, the works of God. This motif proved so popular that Van Ruisdael painted many variants of the same view, making it now one of the most widespread landscapes across the galleries of Europe.

Johannes Vermeer experimented with optical effects in his late The Art of Painting from about 1666-68, where greatest sharpness is slightly away from the geometrical centre of the canvas, in the woman holding a wind instrument. The high tonal contrast between the marble tiles on the floor is softened in the foreground, and sharpens as they recede deeper into the picture, as would be expected in a depth of field effect.

Rembrandt continued to develop his mark-making right up to his death. It’s often at its most florid when he painted fabrics, such as the clothing of the couple shown in The Jewish Bride of about 1665. The Dutch Republic had long been a safe harbour for Jews fleeing from oppression in other European countries, and Rembrandt had cultivated close relationships with members of the large Jewish community in Amsterdam, some of whom had modelled for his depictions of Old Testament stories.

One of Jacob van Ruisdael’s best-known paintings of windmills is this view of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from about 1670. This small town, now a city, is on the bank of the River Rhine, an ideal location for delivering grain by barge, and shipping the resulting flour.

The Hut (1671) was one of Adriaen van de Velde’s last paintings, and has long been esteemed in the Netherlands. It’s one of his most natural compositions, sparkling with bright colour in the clothing and animals. The artist even adds the reality, perhaps as a touch of humour, of some fresh cowpats.

Gerrit Berckheyde’s view of Groote Market in Haarlem from 1673 shows one the largest of the city’s marketplaces at the end of the Golden Age.

This article and its sequel tomorrow try to set some of the finest paintings of the Golden Age in the context of major events in the history of the Dutch Republic.

Constituents of the Dutch Republic are shown in red, orange and yellow in this map. Its centres of art included The Hague, its de facto capital, Utrecht, Leiden, Delft, Harlem, and Amsterdam. To the south were the lands composing the Spanish Netherlands, notably Flanders and Brabant, including the cities of Antwerp and Brussels.

1565-1599

1568 Start of the Eighty Years’ War with Habsburg Spain.
1575 Leiden University founded by Prince William.
1579 The Union of Utrecht laid the foundation for the Dutch Republic.
1585 The city of Antwerp in Brabant was taken by Habsburg forces; to the north, Holland and Zealand started accepting migrants from southern areas under Habsburg control.

One of the driving forces behind Dutch Golden Age painting was the art flourishing in Brabant to the south. Two of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s major paintings from 1565 were formative influences on what was to come: The Harvesters above is a complete account of the grain harvest in the Low Countries, and Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap below is a pure landscape.

1600-1619

1602 The United East India Company (in Dutch, the VOC) was founded as a chartered trading company in Amsterdam, to profit from the spice trade.
1609-21 Twelve Years’ Truce.
1612 The first synagogue was built in Amsterdam.
1618 The first newspaper, the Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c., was published as a weekly broadsheet in Amsterdam.
1619 Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) was made the Asian headquarters of the United East India Company.

Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Scene on a Canal from about 1615 follows on from Brueghel with its rich detail. In the right of the painting are two tents with flags flying. These are popular koek-en-zopie, literally ‘cake and eggnog’ cafés, selling handheld snacks like cake and pancakes, together with alcoholic drinks such as beer laced with home-made rum.

Clara Peeters trained in Antwerp, then painted an outstanding series of still lifes in the Dutch Republic. Among those is her still life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels from about 1615, a celebration of the sensuous pleasures of food.

In 1617, Michiel van Mierevelt and his son Pieter, specialists in portraiture, painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer, one of the earliest portraits of a social group from the Golden Age. These are thought to be members of the Surgeons’ Guild of the city of Delft, who commissioned this work.

1620-1629

1620 The Pilgrim Fathers, English families from Nottinghamshire who had fled to Leiden in 1607-08, set sail from Delfshaven for America.
1621 The Chartered West India Company was founded as a trading company in Amsterdam, to profit from a trade monopoly in the Dutch West Indies, including participation in the Atlantic slave trade.
1625 A fort was built at New Amsterdam, the southern tip of Manhattan Island, New York, to protect the West India Company’s fur trade.

Gerard van Honthorst’s The Soldier and the Girl from about 1621 is a good example of markedly secular painting and the early influence of Caravaggio. This young woman is lighting her candle from a burning coal.

1630-42

1630 Dutch commercial colonies were established in Brazil.
1635 The Dutch Republic made a treaty with France against Habsburg Spain, leading to the Franco-Spanish War.
1637 The speculative bubble of Tulip mania, which had gathered pace from 1634, collapsed dramatically.
1639 The United East India Company became Japan’s exclusive Western trading partner.
1642 Abel Tasman discovered Tasmania and New Zealand.

In 1631 the young Rembrandt moved his studio to Amsterdam, the centre of trade and business for the Dutch Republic, and growing rapidly from a population of about 50,000 in 1600 to exceed 200,000 in the 1660s. Among his early commissions there is this Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp from 1632, a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment.

Rembrandt’s outstanding painting of Belshazzar’s Feast was made in about 1635-38, when he was developing his distinctive techniques of depicting decorative metals.

Artists such as Albert Eckhout accompanied expeditions overseas, and it’s thought that he painted this Study of Two Brazilian Tortoises in about 1640 when in Brazil.

Rembrandt’s vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is perhaps the most famous of all those of militia in the Dutch Republic. It’s more correctly titled Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, and features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam, and took the artist three years to complete from his first commission to its display in the guards’ great hall.

Simon de Vlieger was born in Rotterdam, and painted in Delft and Amsterdam, where he was best known for his landscapes. His Beach View from 1643 uses boats, many figures, and careful composition to swell the land over the bottom of its panel. It shows well, though, how important is the sky, marvellously rendered here, with a small group of white birds shown against the grey of the clouds.

The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic was a period of war and turmoil. It started in the latter half of the Eighty Years War, thrived when that came to an end in 1648, and collapsed following the Disaster Year (Rampjaar) of 1672. That year brought both the Franco-Dutch and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, invasion, rebellion, economic crisis, and collapse of the art market.

When he was just twenty, the French artist Antoine Coypel painted this Glory of Louis XIV after the Peace of Nijmegen (1681), which gained him admission as a full member to the Académie Royale.

The Treaty of Nijmegen brought an end to the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-78, and was one of a series France signed between August 1678 and September of the following year. These were acclaimed a great success for Louis XIV and France, which gained extensive territory in the north and east as a result. Louis was henceforth known as the Sun King. In this elaborate allegorical flattery, the king is being crowned in the upper left, above a gathering of deities including Minerva, who is wearing her distinctive helmet and golden robes.

Painting didn’t stop, of course, and some artists continued into the following century, but the number of masters declined rapidly.

Domenicus van Wijnen continued to paint, for example his radical interpretation of The Temptation of Saint Anthony in about 1685. Although this may have appeared an outlier at the time, its symbols and composition may have inspired the ‘faerie’ paintings that became popular in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Other artists like Adriaen van der Werff reverted to more traditional themes and style, in his Judgement of Paris from 1716.

The Golden Age was revisited by artists in the nineteenth century, particularly in the period scenes painted by Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate. His Soldier and Men in an Inn shows a scene from the Eighty Years War, with the walls decorated by blue on white Delft tiles. This must have been painted between 1850-80, over two centuries after the end of that war.

Early in the career of the Dutch artist Jozef Israëls, he painted The Seamstress (1850-88) as a genre interior from the Golden Age. A young Dutchwoman works with her needle and thread in the light of an unseen window at the left. In the background to the right, there’s a group of Delft tiles on the wall, and there’s a single tulip in a glass vase at the left.

The impact of Golden Age paintings on European art history was broad and deep, with secular themes becoming more popular than the religious and mythological works that had dominated the art of the Renaissance. New genres, like still life, may not have been rated as highly as history painting, but became widespread.

Late in his career, in 1766, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin painted The Attributes of the Arts and the Rewards Which Are Accorded Them, in which each object has a clear association. Painting is represented by the brushes and palette on top of a paintbox. Architectural drawings and drawing tools represent architecture. The bronze pitcher at the right refers to the work of the goldsmith. The red portfolio tied with ribbons represents drawing. The plaster model of the figure of Mercury in the centre is a copy of a sculpture by J B Pigalle, a friend of Chardin, who was the first sculptor to win the highest French honour for artists, the Order of Saint Michael, whose cross and ribbon are shown at the left.

Greatest impact was in landscape painting. Prior to the Golden Age, landscapes had primarily been used as accessories to other genres. Most were idealised rather than accurate representations of any real location, and many were mere settings for narratives.

The Dutch vogue for expressive skies spread steadily across Europe. This is reflected in Joseph Vernet’s Italianate Harbour Scene from 1749. He still retains formal compositional elements, with figures in the foreground, and scenery behind, but delights in showing us these towering cumulus clouds lit so richly.

Marine painting became established as a sub-genre, as shown by the British painter Clarkson Stanfield, whose Dutch Barge and Merchantmen Running out of Rotterdam from 1856 includes rich detail, even down to dilapidated buildings on the waterfront.

Many of John Crome’s landscapes feature skies inspired by Dutch painters. His Landscape with Windmills is one of his most remarkable, as a signed painting that appears to have been sketched in front of the motif. Others who skied include John Constable and JMW Turner.

Nocturnes were less reliable, as they underwent phases when they were fashionable, then fell into neglect for a while.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler had a penchant for nocturnes, here his Nocturne: Blue and Gold — Southampton Water from 1872. Its vague blue-greys make the pinpoints of light and the rising sun shine out in contrast, a good reason for limiting his palette, while remaining faithful to nature.

JMW Turner’s Fishermen at Sea from 1796, showing small fishing boats working in heavy swell off The Needles, on the Isle of Wight, is probably the most famous and successful coastal nocturne of all time. This was Turner’s first oil painting to be exhibited at the Royal Academy, when he was just twenty-one.

Paintings by artists of the Dutch Republic had been sold into collections across Europe, where many remain, influencing today’s artists.

As in other countries across Europe at the time, industry in the Dutch Republic during the Golden Age was largely dependent on wind and water, forces that were seldom in short supply. Here’s a small selection of what were effectively some of the first paintings of industry long before the industrial revolution.

Both watermills and windmills date back to ancient times, and became widespread in the Middle Ages. By the seventeenth century they were used for grinding grain into flour, processing wool and fabrics, sharpening tools, forging and metalcraft, manufacturing paper, sawing timber, and sundry other purposes.

Jacob van Ruisdael’s Two Watermills and an Open Sluice from 1653 is not just a superb landscape painting, but a clear technical account of one of the commonest types of watermill.

Since the Middle Ages in Europe, by far the most common type of waterwheel stands vertically, turning a horizontal axle. The terrain here is fairly flat, so the water supplying the mill comes from only slightly above the level of the outlet. Therefore, the mill is undershot, with only the lowest part of each waterwheel getting wet at any moment. To the right of the twin waterwheels is a sluice gate and overflow to control the level of water in the millpond upstream. Additional sluice gates set upstream of the two wheels give fine control over the water flowing through the mill race or leat, and can be used to stop the wheels from turning when the mill isn’t in use.

Van Ruisdael’s Landscape with a Watermill and Men Cutting Reeds from about the same year shows a smaller and simpler mill which is also undershot. Although the mill buildings may appear dilapidated, the gear appears better maintained and still in everyday use. There’s even a figure at the door of the millhouse.

In another painting from about the same time, van Ruisdael’s Landscape with a Mill-run and Ruins shows what had once been a substantial watermill in an advanced state of decay. The extensive brickwork was used to channel the mill race.

Van Ruisdael’s enthusiasm for painting watermills was passed on to his successor Meindert Hobbema. His Wooded Landscape with a Watermill from 1663 shows another undershot mill in similarly flat and wooded terrain. Hobbema used more staffage than van Ruisdael, though, as shown here in the couple and livestock.

Van Ruisdael’s watermills are desolate, devoid of people, but Hobbema’s magnificent Watermill from about 1664 accommodates a family: the wife is out doing the washing in a barrel, while the husband and son walk through their garden. It’s also relatively unusual in that the water here is fed through the elevated wooden aqueducts, making this watermill overshot. This could develop more power with a lower flow of water, because it uses the weight of water falling against the blades of the waterwheel rather than just its flow.

The Republic was famous for its numerous windmills, that were almost universally vertical in design, with their sails rotating in a vertical plane. Other parts of Europe, mainly the south and east, often preferred horizontal designs that look very different.

I can count half a dozen windmills clustered around the port of Dordrecht in Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644.

Rembrandt painted few non-narrative landscapes, but among them is this dramatic view of The Mill (1645-48) seen in the rich rays of twilight. This is a classical post mill set on top of a roundhouse, where the whole of the wooden mill structure is built around a central post, and is turned to face into the wind.

The great masters of Dutch landscape art like Jacob van Ruisdael must have painted many hundreds of windmills, of which one of the best-known is this view of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from about 1670. This is a more substantial tower mill, where only the cap at the top rotated to catch the wind. This small town, now a city, is on the bank of the River Rhine, an ideal location for delivering grain by barge, and shipping the resulting flour. This should have kept the mill as busy as the wind allowed, and its owner prosperous.

Golden Age paintings of windmills became so well-known that later artists copied them.

This view of a Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem was painted by John Constable in 1830, almost two centuries after the original by Jacob van Ruisdael.

Watermills and windmills remained in widespread use in the Netherlands until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when they were largely replaced by steam power, fuelled by coal imported from the mining areas of Belgium and north-eastern France, and Britain. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that wind turbines started to make use of the forces of nature again.