Windmill and Boats near Zaandam

What you are looking at

On the left, a big wooden windmill stands on a brick base above a bank of reeds, its four sails angled against a pale, cloudy sky. A long red-roofed shed runs beside it. In front, tall green reeds and rushes crowd the water's edge, and a man stands among them near a moored boat, with another figure seated in it.

Further right, a cluster of sailing barges with dark sails and tall masts is tied up along the bank. On the open water to the right, a rowing boat with three people moves toward us, oars out; a second small boat floats beyond it, and smoke drifts from a distant steamer. A flock of birds wheels across the upper right of the sky.

The palette is restrained: gray-white sky, olive and green reeds, brown and black for the mill and boats. Mooring posts stand in the water at right, and the far shore is a thin dark line with a few buildings.

Zaandam, summer 1871

After his exile in London during the Franco-Prussian War, Claude Monet did not go straight back to France. In June 1871 he traveled to Zaandam, an industrial town on the river Zaan north of Amsterdam, and stayed until October with Camille and their son Jean. The Zaan district was full of windmills, hundreds of them, used for sawing timber, grinding pigment and pressing oil. Monet painted about two dozen canvases there, mostly of the river, the harbor, the houses and the mills.

This painting, catalogued by Wildenstein as W.177, is one of several mill views. Others are in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (W.181), the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (W.170) and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (W.178), and together they show how thoroughly he explored the motif in a single summer.

How it was painted

The water is the most freely painted part. Monet lays it in with long horizontal strokes of gray and cream and pulls the reflections of the posts, reeds and rowing boat straight down in short dark verticals. Look at the rowing boat: three figures and two oars, each a few marks, yet the oars clearly dip on either side.

The reeds in the foreground are a different handwriting, quick upward flicks of green and yellow, with a few taller stalks standing against the sky at far left. The windmill, by contrast, is built up solidly in browns and blacks, and its sails are drawn with a few confident strokes, one of them foreshortened so the mill seems to turn toward us. The birds in the sky are tiny V-shaped marks, the kind of detail that gives an empty sky life.

The overcast, silvery light, very different from his later bright palette, shows how much Monet was still absorbing from Dutch landscape painting and from the gray skies of London. Look at the sky: it is not blank but laid in with broad, loose strokes of white, gray and the faintest pink, brushed in several directions.

The Zaandam pictures and how this one differs

Monet's Dutch views fall into a few groups: the town seen along the river, as in Zaandam in the Orsay; the green wooden houses on the banks, as in Houses on the Riverbank in Zaandam and Houses on the Achterzaan; and the mills. This canvas combines the mill with river traffic, reeds and people, so it is a fuller picture of working life on the Zaan than most of the mill studies, which isolate the windmill against the sky.

Monet came back to Holland in 1886 for Tulip Fields in Holland, where a windmill again anchors the view, though in sunlight and high color. The London months that came just before Zaandam are covered on Monet in London.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen (MIN 3233), best known for its sculpture but also home to a strong group of French paintings. For other collections, see Where to See Monet's Paintings.