THE SUNLIGHT REFLECTED IN THE RHINE: THAT LIGHT WOULD HAVE struck Rembrandt’s eyes in earliest infancy. When the outside door to Weddesteeg was open, he could hear the water in the river sloshing and slopping against the quayside. And later, looking out from the upstairs window over the high embankment, he would have seen the light gleaming and flashing in an endless pattern of dancing green wavelets.
There, in the skyline of the city’s western ramparts, where the Rhine flowed out of Leiden, stood his father’s malt-mill. The sounds made by the mill would have woven themselves into the fabric of the boy’s everyday experience. When the wind picked up, the mill’s sails would whir and whistle and he would hear the wooden wheels grind and creak and the millstones turning as they crushed the malt to flour. When Rembrandt climbed the stairs to the cap and opened the door, he would see bright sunbeams piercing the swirling malt flakes in sharp bars of light.
It makes perfect sense that the visionary nobleman Don Quixote, the hero of the first great European novel, by Miguel de Cervantes (1605), mistakes windmills for “hulking giants” that could chop off your head with a single powerful swing of their long arms.
The importance of windmills to the people of the Netherlands can scarcely be overstated. “God created the earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands,” as the saying goes. It was the windmills that enabled the polders to be reclaimed, wresting land from water. And to keep the country’s trade and industry going, to mill flour for bakers in wartime as well as peacetime, the cities of Holland relied heavily on their windmills.
Millers were highly respected. Mills represented the beginning of the industrial and technological revolution in the Low Countries and everyone knew that they generated income. So acute was this realization that in the seventeenth century the cities of Holland went so far as to introduce a special tax on wind. It specifically targeted millers, of course—the only people who could make a living from the wind.
Ironically, all the wonderful advantages of millers’ lives end up being used against them in songs, sayings and stage plays. In folk tales, they are consistently portrayed as debauchees and bungling swindlers. To this day, the turning of the great axle in the wheels of a windmill is a common expression for deception: “iemand een rad voor ogen draaien”, “turning a wheel to blur someone’s sight”.
In the farce Meulenaer (“The Miller”), written in 1613 by the celebrated Dutch playwright Gerbrandt Adriaensz Bredero, a miller in the polder offers a lady from the city a room for the night. Wily Pete tries to seduce Trijn Jans, but just when he thinks everything is going according to plan he discovers that he is spending the night with his own wife Aeltje, who has swapped beds with Trijn in the dead of night. Wily Pete is not so wily after all. He roars to the audience a few lines of doggerel that may be roughly rendered:
Oh Citizens, let your Wives be guarded wellish
Or send them to the Miller, he’ll sort them out with relish.
Wily Pete is bothered by the bad reputation of his trade: millers were constantly being accused of giving their clients less flour than was owed from their grain. But his rant only makes matters worse, confirming the proverbial wisdom:
Always they shout “Miller steals your grain”—
And off he goes with bulging sacks again.
Whatever the dubious reputation of millers, the mills themselves were valued so highly as symbols of indomitability and vitality that during the siege of Leiden, when grain supplies were dwindling, the sails of the empty mills were kept up and running. In the city this became an expression for a meaningless gesture that nonetheless bolsters morale: “Keep the windmills turning for the Prince.”
Before the siege in 1573, all the mills stood out in the countryside, where they could freely catch the wind. The one belonging to Rembrandt’s grandfather, Gerrit Roelofsz, stood beyond the city walls on the Rhine. That section of the river was known as Galgewater (“Gallows Waterway”), after the nearby field where executed convicts were left swinging from the gallows, “to be consumed by the air and the birds”, as the death sentence prescribed. Rembrandt was familiar with the sight of death from earliest childhood.
The father and grandfather of Gerrit Roelofsz had also been malt-millers. The first information about the family dates from 1484, with an entry in the register of St Catharine’s Hospital on Breestraat recording that Rembrandt’s paternal great-great-grandfather had delivered “13 batches of crushed malt”. From one generation to the next, the family supplied crushed malt that would be used to brew beer.
On 30th November 1573, a plume of smoke spiralled into the air above Leiden. Soldiers, militia guards and burghers flocked to Wittepoort to see where it was coming from. They gaped at the inferno on the opposite bank of the Rhine: the windmill was ablaze like a huge torch. The wood of the internal cap crackled and flared. Sparks sputtered from the sails and thick black smoke billowed skyward.
When rumours started circulating that the Spanish troops of General Francisco de Valdés were advancing on Leiden, the mills were hastily dismantled. Like gigantic wooden assembly kits, they were taken apart, loaded onto barges and transported up the Rhine and into the city to safety. They were reassembled on the ramparts to supply the people with grain and malt for bread and beer.
For Gerrit Roelofsz’s mill, this intervention came too late. It had not been brought within the city walls in time to save it. The miller himself died in 1573. The exact date of his death is unknown, so we cannot be sure whether he saw his own mill go up in flames. In any case it was a double tragedy. His widow, Lijsbeth Harmensdr, was left to care for their four young children, of whom Harmen was the youngest. And left without a mill.
Harmen, Rembrandt’s father, was just six years old when the Spanish troops laid siege to Leiden. The story of the destruction of the mill was deeply embedded in the Van Rijn family’s collective memory. Rembrandt will have heard the story countless times.
Lijsbeth Harmensdr was not one to succumb to passive grief after her husband’s death. Less than two months after the Relief, on 23rd November 1574, she obtained ownership of the Pelicaen, the corn windmill on the outermost tip of the city’s western ramparts. She remarried. Her second husband was the miller Cornelis Claesz van Berckel; the last part of his name indicates that he came from Berckel, near Rotterdam. Rembrandt would call him “Grandfather”.
On 8th August 1575, Lijsbeth asked the city council for permission to build a second windmill, next to the Pelicaen, “on the ramparts beside Wittepoort to the north”. She was clearly an enterprising businesswoman and must have taken on a considerable debt to achieve all this within such a brief space of time. Her new husband probably contributed to the costs, although the tax records do not provide clear evidence from which to conclude that he had enough capital.
Pieter Bast, Lugduni Batavor. Leyden in Hollant (detail), 1600.
As soon as Lijsbeth obtained the city council’s consent, she sold her share in the first mill and purchased a windmill from jonkheer Jan van der Does, a local hero during the Spanish siege. Her new mill was dismantled in Noordwijk and set up on the ramparts near the Wittepoort. The mill became known as the Rijn after the river, and from then on the miller’s family added Rijn to its surname.
The new acquisition was a post-mill, the earliest type of windmill in the Low Countries. It was relatively light and narrow, was mounted on a forked post like a waterbird, and the mill’s cap could turn towards the wind. Lijsbeth’s decision to set her mill on the western rampart was quite deliberate, since that is the main direction from which the wind blows in Holland. The Van Rijn family looked out from their home towards the west: in the evening they saw the sun set over the meandering river.
The windmill had no living space at the foot of the post, the massive wooden base supporting the cap with its sails, axle, gears and millstones. She therefore bought the mill-house in Weddesteeg immediately behind the ramparts and moved in there with her children and her new husband. That was the place where Harmen, who would later take over as the miller, would grow up, and where his youngest son Rembrandt was born.
Rembrandt never painted or drew his father’s windmill and never set up a studio in it, as was believed in the nineteenth century. The mill was simply unsuitable for such a purpose. Nor did he produce any paintings or drawings of Weddesteeg or the house in which he was born. At least, none have been preserved. We can hypothesize that as an apprentice, an assistant, or after he set up as an independent artist in his native city in 1625, he may well have practised in his immediate surroundings or on the landscape that stretched out beyond the Wittepoort. However, no such sketches have come down to us.
Only one drawing exists that might stir a little doubt. Around 1630, Rembrandt drew a dark path. To the left is the line of ramparts, while on the right the houses cast shadows across the path. At the far end we see an archway of some kind, with two figures walking below the structure. A diagonal accent runs through the composition, from upper right to lower left. In the upper-left corner the sky is bright and clear and the paper has scarcely been touched, while in the lower-right corner Rembrandt has applied brown ink: you can still see the brushstrokes. In the dark corner, with a few flourishes of the pen, he has added a sleeping dog, its head resting on its front paws.
This rough sketch appears to have been made en plein air. It is tempting to see the drawing as an image of Weddesteeg. If you entered the alley from Noordeinde, you would have the ramparts on your left—a two-metre-odd wall, with sand piled up behind it—and houses on your right. First the side of the last house on Noordeinde, then the mill-house—breadthwise—and finally a number of dwellings with neck and step-gables.
At the end of the alley, almost at the river’s edge, stood a small stone gate. This was part of the city’s old defences, which consisted of an internal canal, an immensely thick stone wall and a strip of land along the Rhine. Part of that bank was used by the painter’s step-grandfather, Cornelisz Claes van Berckel, as a bleaching field. Rembrandt played there as a boy and it was there that his mother and sisters laid out the washing to dry.
View of the City within the Walls, c.1630.
In 1576 Jan van Hout had ordered a bird’s-eye map from the local draughtsman Hans Liefrinck, to fulfil his mission of recording the city’s physical features for administrative purposes. And Liefrinck duly included the little structure with its rounded arch. However, in maps of the city dating from after 1611 there is no such archway. That was the year in which the old city wall around the corner from the house in which Rembrandt was born was torn down and the inner canal was filled in. The new quayside was aptly named Nedergeleyde Vestwalle—“Demolished Rampart Wall”.
In 1611, work started on the opposite side of the river on building a completely new part of the city that would expand Leiden enormously. The new, modern defensive works were constructed outside this new district. In 1612, a long wooden bridge was built at the end of Weddesteeg to connect the two parts of the city. Rembrandt was then six years old.
This means that the drawing of the city’s outskirts that Rembrandt made in 1630 must depict the situation of his early childhood rather than the contemporaneous reality. It harks back to a distant memory. The drawing is sketch-like and scarcely evokes Leiden at all; it has an exotic air. It might be a study for a history painting or a biblical scene. Paintings depicting the Road to Emmaus in Judea, where Jesus appeared to two disciples on their way to celebrate Passover, are often set near a city gate. Rembrandt was not trying to capture the alley of his youth in this drawing: the aim was to explore the play of light beneath an archway at the end of a dark path.
Possibly, he never made any drawings of his physical surroundings in Leiden. Only later, in Amsterdam, did he make drawings and etchings of the landscape around the city—polders, gardens, trees, windmills. You can still follow in his footsteps as he trudged along the bank of the River Amstel. Indeed, he even drew himself in that landscape, wearing a hat to shield himself from the fierce rays of the sun, a sketchbook across his knees. It is astonishing what his hand could conjure up with just a few movements.
Rembrandt wanted to make history paintings, the genre that was most highly regarded: images of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history, in which the painter acquires the status of divine narrator. From this perspective, he did not yet take much interest in the genre of landscape painting. Whether in drawings or paintings, his immediate surroundings could not serve as the subject: landscape was only a setting, background scenery.
Even so, Rembrandt did paint a windmill that stirs the imagination. Some twenty years after he had bid farewell to his native city—we do not have a signature or date—he painted a windmill on some city ramparts. Or possibly we should say the windmill on the ramparts of the city. The painting has the atmosphere of a spooky fairy tale. A magic windmill stands amid an arcadian landscape, with dark clouds gathering overhead. The hulking giant raises a single sail in the manner of a sword piercing the welkin.
The landscape around the windmill is not very different from the topographical situation around the Pelicaen. The plump curves of the city ramparts make an authentic impression, resembling those drawn by others in the same period. That is what defensive works looked like at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Are those hedges, in the midst of the darkness? It is well known that the city’s ramparts, as additional defences, were often overgrown with thorn bushes. And over there, to the left behind the windmill, is that the top of a façade? Is there an alley at the back there?
It might be Weddesteeg, but there are striking differences between this image and the historical situation. To start with, the Pelicaen itself has vanished from the rampart in the foreground, which is depicted empty and abandoned. If you look closely, the windmill stands—as seen from the north—on a second rampart farther back. Just like his father’s mill.
X-rays of the canvas reveal that Rembrandt had started by painting a stone bridge, at the spot where an oarsman is now gliding into the foreground and a washerwoman is causing ripples in the water. The crooked bridge to Wittepoort is missing, and on the other side of the water, where carriages and barges departed in the direction of The Hague, there are now grazing cattle. The little spire of a village church peeps out above the canopy.
Then there is something very odd, certainly for a miller’s son who watched countless times as his father and his assistant hoisted up the sails and attached them to the mill, at which the sails would catch the wind and start the gears turning. Faster, faster, faster. In his painting, he has depicted the sails turning clockwise rather than the usual anti-clockwise direction. He did the same in an etching of a post-mill just outside Amsterdam. Did he fail to take account of the inversion of the image when the etchings were printed?
It is possible. Even so, the reverse direction of the sails in the painting remains puzzling. Rembrandt painted from life. Might he, on this occasion, have drawn on his astonishing visual memory? Did he think that he knew the landscape of his boyhood inside out? Did he think the play of light was more pleasing with the sails set in this direction?
We shall never know. All we can say is that whatever the accuracy of the sails, Rembrandt showed himself in this painting to be a master of illusion. For what a sense of drama he infused into the scene. The heavy bastion is reflected blackly in the water. The windmill, illuminated in sunny ochre, stands out against the brooding clouds.
A storm is coming.
The Mill, 1645–48.