There seems to be some confusion over what windmills are, so this weekend I show a selection of paintings of them across Europe. This article covers the period between 1500-1850, when they remained popular. From the twelfth century until the twentieth, they were a common sight on many skylines in northern Europe. Preceding the better-known vertical windmills were various horizontal designs, and windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the nineteenth century. Used wherever there was a need for driving a rotating axle, they were widely employed to grind cereals into flour, power sawmills, make paper, grind materials, and thresh corn.

Hieronymus Bosch’s uniquely imaginative paintings often featured realistic background landscapes. One recurring setting is a city based on Antwerp or his home town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, with a windmill closest to the viewer. This appears in the centre panel of his triptych The Adoration of the Magi from about 1490-1500, for instance.

A similar windmill appears in a slightly different setting in the version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony now in Lisbon, from around 1500-10, in its right wing. This is shown in the detail below.

The Bruegels also worked amid many windmills, but none seems so prominently out of place than in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Procession to Calvary from 1564. Windmills were commonly built on hills, where they would benefit from the most consistent wind, but this example on a towering crag is not only geographically inappropriate, but completely impractical. It stands on a circular platform to allow the mill to rotate according to the direction of the wind, but would hardly have been above Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion.

More at home are the half dozen windmills clustered around the port of Dordrecht in the Netherlands, shown 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.

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 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.

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

Windmills were also a common sight along the lower reaches of the River Thames. William Hogarth’s print from his Industry and Idleness series shows its anti-hero Idle being rowed out to join his ship at Cuckold’s Point on the River Thames, opposite what were then the West Indian docks, between Limehouse and Greenwich. Long after these windmills had gone, this section of the river was still involved with the grain trade.

There were other windmills upstream of the city of London too. In what must be Thomas Girtin’s most famous painting of The White House at Chelsea, from 1800, the artist looks upstream of the River Thames from a location close to the modern Chelsea Bridge. The landmarks shown include, from the left, Joseph Freeman’s windmill (or Red House Mill), a horizontal air mill, the white house close to where Battersea Park is now, Battersea Bridge, and Chelsea Old Church. Girtin painted this when he was twenty-five, and showing greater promise than his rival JMW Turner. Two years later Girtin died of asthma.

A few years later the topographic painter John Varley painted this close-up view of the same Red House Mill, Battersea, Surrey, looking back in the opposite direction.

Some of the well-known windmills supplying the city of Paris with its flour were those above its outskirts on Montmartre Hill. Georges Michel’s view of The Mill of Montmartre was probably painted in about 1820, by which time there were only a few left.

Richard Parkes Bonington probably painted Barges on a River in around 1825-6 when he was travelling near the French town of Nantes. The windmill seen behind the trees is reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.

During his detailed realist period early in his career, Johan Jongkind painted this View of Maassluis in Winter (1848). Following the long tradition of landscape painting in the Netherlands, he sets his horizon low and paints a wonderful winter sky.

Until the advent of chemistry in the eighteenth century, early in the Age of Enlightenment, the vast majority of pigments occurred in nature, even if the minerals or plant matter from which they were derived had to be specially processed. The first truly synthetic pigment was so ancient that it had been forgotten completely by the Middle Ages: Egyptian blue was originally made before about 3000 BCE by heating together powdered rocks and sand, but that was an exception. It wasn’t until the early years of the eighteenth century that a hydrated iron hexacyanoferrate complex soon known as Prussian blue was synthesized.

No one knows who first made Prussian blue, nor exactly when it was first synthesized. It seems to have appeared initially around 1704, and its origins have been attributed variously to Diesbach in Berlin, or Mak in Leipzig. For once its name is appropriate, as it was a product of the Prussian Empire. Its potential as a colourant was recognised by 1710 when it went on sale in Berlin, and by about 1724 it was being manufactured across Europe.

Among the earliest surviving oil paintings to use Prussian Blue is that by Adriaen van der Werff and Henrik van Limborch, of Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph. This was started by van der Werff before he died in 1722, and the paint containing Prussian blue pigment is thought to have been applied by him to the curtain at the upper left. After van der Werff’s death, his pupil Henrik van Limborch finished the painting between 1727-28.

Another early example of the proven use of Prussian blue is Antoine Watteau’s The Italian Comedians from about 1720.

Canaletto is one of the first Masters to have used the new pigment extensively. Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi toward the Rialto from 1720-23 has been attributed to him as one of his earliest surviving works, and its blues have been found to contain Prussian blue.

Canaletto was quick to adopt the pigment for use in almost all his paintings, including this view of the Rio dei Mendicanti from 1723-24, above, and his famous The Stonemason’s Yard (c 1725), below.

As experience was gained in using this pigment, it became controversial. Some artists were confident that its colour was stable and didn’t change or fade, but others experienced problems as bad as or even worse than those of the notoriously fugitive indigo blue, which it had generally replaced. It has gradually become understood that adverse results of lightfastness testing (and experience in paintings) have depended on the mixture of Prussian blue with other colours, particularly with white paint, and the presence of impurities in the pigment.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Prussian blue was widely used with a range of binding media, with the notable exception of fresco and other alkaline media with which it proved incompatible.

William Hogarth’s paintings in his Marriage A-la-Mode series have been found to contain both smalt and Prussian blues. In The Tête à Tête (c 1743), smalt has been found in the ornate carpet, and I suspect that the ornamental pillars behind the woman rely on Prussian blue, at least in part. Hogarth trained as Prussian blue came to the ascendant, and wouldn’t have painted much before it had become widely available.

Jean-Baptiste Perronneau’s A Girl with a Kitten from about 1743 is a fine example of the use of Prussian blue in pastels: the girl’s blue dress and the background have both been found to contain the pigment.

Prussian blue also became popular in water-based media. William Blake’s Lucia Carrying Dante in his Sleep, from his series depicting Dante’s Divine Comedy painted in watercolour between 1824-27, is a good example. In this and several other of his paintings, Blake used the pigment on its own and mixed with gamboge yellow in what was known as Prussian green.

Prussian blue pigment has been found in the blue passages in Whistler’s The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65), from his Peacock Room, shown above and in the detail below.

The use of different blue pigments varied markedly among the French Impressionists and their successors. Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat appear to have used Prussian blue seldom if at all, but it’s well known in the work of Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh.

Although Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869) contains cobalt blue in the brighter mid-blues of the water surface and details in the boats, darker blues towards the left, and in the clothing of some of the figures and their reflections, are almost certainly Prussian blue.

Vincent van Gogh’s portrait of La Mousmé from 1888 illustrates some of the difficulties of identifying pigment use. Its unusual title is derived from the Japanese word musume, meaning girl; at the time the French word was understood to mean an ‘easy’ girl.

Infra-red images demonstrate van Gogh’s use of at least two different blues, one of which has been identified as Prussian blue. The two (or more) blue pigments aren’t distributed evenly: on the girl’s jacket, the three blue stripes to the left of the row of buttons contain the most Prussian blue, while the three under her right armpit, which look darker, contain little or no Prussian blue. Van Gogh also mixed yellow with Prussian blue to form the green of the flowers she holds in her hand.

Prussian blue remained a popular pigment in oil and watercolour paints well into the twentieth century, and is still offered in commercial ranges. For many artists, though, it has been replaced by much more recent synthetic blue pigments, such as phthalocyanine (‘phthalo’) blue, introduced around 1970, and is seldom used in Prussian green.

Reference

Barbara H Berrie (1997) Artists’ Pigments, vol 3, ed Elisabeth West Fitzhugh, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 76 0.

As a primary colour, red is essential to most palettes, but it has also proved technically challenging to find pigments that are both intense and lasting. This weekend I look at the history of two contenders, in vermilion and crimson, names also steeped in history.

There’s one red that looks as brilliant today as when it was first brushed out five hundred or even two thousand years ago. It’s a pigment known to, and used by, the Romans, and in ancient China was not only used extensively in art, but was scattered in graves. Vermilion is one of the most toxic pigments, and over the last century has been displaced by cadmium red and more novel organic pigments. Look at many paintings made before 1870, and their reds are likely to be dominated by vermilion.

For a long time, vermilion paint was made using powdered cinnabar, naturally-occurring mercuric sulphide, and is then technically known as cinnabar rather than vermilion. Its manufacture from liquid mercury was probably brought from China to Europe, since when much of the vermilion pigment used in Europe has been synthetic.

The main source of cinnabar, and of the metal mercury, in Europe were the mines at Almadén in Spain. These were used by the Romans, and until their closure in 2000 had produced more cinnabar and mercury than any other location. In 1563, deposits were discovered in Huancavelica in Peru, and they were the second largest source over the following three hundred years. Other important sources have been located in China, Slovenia, Italy, Mexico, and the USA.

The mining of cinnabar has long been recognised as hazardous due to its great toxicity, something known as far back as the Romans. Locked in pigment particles in oil paint it’s less hazardous than in water-based paints such as egg tempera; it’s wisest not to use cinnabar or vermilion in dry form, as in pastels, even with good respiratory and skin protection. Even with careful handling, pigment residues pose a serious threat to the environment.

The brightest of the reds in Duccio’s Transfiguration, from the Maestà Predella Panels painted in 1307-11, have the distinctive colour of vermilion. It is often associated with holy people, and holy objects, and contrasts with the other brilliant pigment of ultramarine, which is conventionally used in the clothing of the Virgin Mary.

Its one unfortunate habit is a tendency to blacken, by forming the black version of cinnabar known as metacinnabar. This tends to happen more often in the thinner, less protective paint films of aqueous media, particularly egg tempera, as shown in Nardo di Cione’s Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist and Saint James from 1363-65. The lining of the clothing of the saint at the right uses vermilion, and has darkened in patches as a result.

Masaccio’s panel of Saints Jerome and John the Baptist from the Santa Maria Maggiore Altarpiece, from 1428-29, is another fine example of the use of a lot of vermilion (as cinnabar). The robes of Saint Jerome, on the left, may also show a little darkening in patches, but contrast well with the paler and pinker red of Saint John the Baptist at the right.

Cinnabar saw extensive and highly effective use by the van Eycks in The Ghent Altarpiece (c 1432). Because this was painted in oils, the chances of discolouration are much lower.

Botticelli used cinnabar in several passages in his Mystic Nativity (1500), where its persistent colour contrasts with his use of other red pigments, which haven’t retained their colour as well.

All the Masters and most other significant artists of the past used cinnabar, or vermilion when it was being manufactured in Europe by the early seventeenth century. Tintoretto was no exception, as shown in these two examples: Jupiter and Semele (1545) above, and The Origin of the Milky Way (c 1575), below.

Peter Paul Rubens’ centre panel of the Descent from the Cross (1612-14) in the huge triptych in Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, in Antwerp, is one of the most spectacular demonstrations of the use of vermilion, and its lasting chromatic brilliance.

Rembrandt is another Master who used vermilion to great effect, here in the dress of the woman at the right, in his Belshazzar’s Feast (c 1635-38). The colour draws attention to her as she is so shocked as to empty the goblet she is holding in her right hand. A duller colour might have allowed this dramatic action to pass unnoticed by the viewer.

Aelbert Cuyp’s Hilly River Landscape with a Horseman talking to a Shepherdess from about 1655-60 is one of the few oil paintings in which darkening of cinnabar has become obvious. The pigment serves well in the huntsman’s coat, but has darkened in patches.

William Hogarth played on another common association of the colour red in the third painting, The Inspection, from his series Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743). Although in English we usually refer to a scarlet woman, rather than a vermilion one, his use of vermilion here is effective in portraying the woman as a prostitute.

Vermilion remained popular well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, long enough for it to grace the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the French Impressionists.

Although Claude Monet used just a few dabs and strokes of vermilion in his landmark painting Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869), he continued to use it well into the latter years of his career. By that time, though, the new cadmium reds were replacing vermilion, a process that is almost complete today, with cadmiums now being superceded by modern organic pigments.

Reference

RJ Gettens, RL Feller & WT Chase (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, ed Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.