The instantly recognizable silhouette of a windmill, with its towering structure and rotating blades, has become an iconic symbol of The Netherlands. From their early construction there in the thirteenth century, these large machines have played a crucial role in the country’s agricultural, engineering, and industrial heritage. Harnessing wind power to create energy, windmills were used to process grains and other organic materials as well as to pump excess water for flood prevention and land management. Notably, from the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch reclaimed 425 square miles of land from the sea, roughly the size of Los Angeles, through the use of dikes and dams sustained by windmills, prompting the popular adage “God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland.”

This Focus on the Peck Collection installation features three nineteenth-century images in which windmills are a principal element of each composition. The Peck Collection watercolor by Gerrit Lamberts depicts a mill on the outskirts of town while the etching by Johan Barthold Jongkind and the photograph by an unknown artist portray multiple windmills in two distinct rural landscapes. Featuring the locales of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Zaandam, each underscores the persistent role of windmills in nineteenth-century Dutch life and how artists employed them in their work as both picturesque motifs and as symbols of Dutch ingenuity and innovation.