V - Forever spinning … Windmills

The use of windmills is documented since ancient times. Thanks to wind energy, Dutch succeeded to dry their land from the invading waters and replace swamps by grounds of high quality (polders). Today the pumps are electrically powered but some of the mills are still in place like in Kinderdijk close to Rotterdam  for the pleasure of bikers and hikers… 

Windmills in the Kinderdijk area, Netherlands

Credits: CS-L

Windmills are a recurrent topic or motive in the Dutch painting. In Ryusdael's painting below if the mill is the dominating element, the artist wanted to combine it with three main features of the Dutch landscape: le Lek river waters, the flatness of the low land and the threatening sky… Wijk bij Duurstede is a known place in Holland for bikers along the Rhine: it is the place at the intersection of the Lek with the Amsterdam/Rijnkanaal where the ferry will allow to continue the excursion…The castle and the windmill are still there to visit.

Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael (ca 1628-1682),

The windmill at the Wijk bij Duurstede, ca 1668/72,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Most of the windmills have been destroyed or have disappeared from our European landscapes because they progressively became useless. However some of them have survived with the power of myths and legends like for instance the Moulin de Fontvielle referring to Alphonse Daudet's "Les lettres de mon moulin" (letters from my windmill). Daudet never lived there and this series of novels about Provence were written... in Clamart (a suburb of Paris).

Moulin de Fontvieille

Credits: Wikpedia

Another myth: Le Moulin Rouge which is visited every year by thousands of tourists at the Place Blanche/White square. In the past (1790), stood at this place a toll gate (Barriere Blanche). A mandatory place to cross for the numerous horse carriages that wanted to enter into Paris loaded with the flour from the mills or the extracted gypsum from the Montmartre quarries. Today this is over, the fuel of this very special mill is no longer wind but champagne!

Le Moulin Rouge, Paris

Credits: CS-L

Vincent Van Gogh left the Netherlands in 1886 to visit his brother Theo who was living rue Lepic in Montmartre. Le moulin de la Gallette stood very close to this place and Vincent van Gogh made few paintings of it. In the copy below, did he want to revisit a familiar topic of the old Dutch masters or simply represent something reminding him his native country? The outcome still looks academic though the influence of the French impressionists (light clours) can be noticed. The hilly relief of Montmartre is clearly put in evidence and the absence of constructions around raises the impression to feel paradoxically in a countryside landscape… Montmartre was still a peripheral village at that time.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), le moulin de la Galette, 1886

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittburgh, USA

Credit: Wikipedia

Let's come back to Holland with Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël. The painting below was made three years only after the van Gogh's one above. The intention of the painter here was to put in evidence the saturated colors of the Dutch landscape… (when it is not raining :-). The second given name of this painting is also the "Month of July"! In fact we may not be very far from the Kinderdijk representation above by a beautiful summer day...

Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël (1828-1903),

A windmill on a polder waterway, ca 1889,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Piet Mondriaan (1872-1944) Windmill in sunlight: The winkel mill, 1908

Gemeente Museum, Den Haag

…and for those who still wonder about windmills fate:

Screenshot J-L Godard's  Allemagne Année 90 neuf zéro (min. 24), 1991

...Don Quichote in this scene is not interested anymore by the windmills. Instead, he will fight against the "Trabi" just after the engine has re-started :-), leaving the windmills spinning... forever!