Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem

This landscape view is structured along a strong diagonal, using perspective to move from rural to suggested urban space. The windmills diminish in size as they point the way toward Haarlem’s Grote Kerk, the church at this Dutch city’s centre. The Dutch painter Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9–82) has also used dramatic lighting in the foreground to help convey this spatial progression, using a dark foreground to emphasise the bright highlight of the path cutting through. In the clouds overhead, swirling textured brush strokes are visible, adding to the breezy atmospheric feel of this scene – and suggesting the wind turning the windmill’s sails. 

Ruisdael was the preeminent Dutch landscape painter of the mid-seventeenth century, painting landscapes both from life and from his own imagination. He often painted scenes inspired by the areas near Haarlem, where he was born and spent his early life. Dulwich Picture Gallery also has a copy of this painting by the later British artist John Constable (1776–1837). Constable’s version, from 1830, contains additional figures that were once present in the Ruisdael but, following pigment analysis, these were determined to be later additions and were removed from Ruisdael’s picture in 1997.