Country Road with Windmill

This copper plate is only about 9 by 15 centimetres, small enough that the museum shows it in a display case, and it holds windmills standing on a wide, flat plain, painted in 1611. How it reached Munich is a piece of German history. The Palatine electors, whose capital was Mannheim on the Rhine, inherited Bavaria in 1777 and moved their court to Munich, but their picture gallery stayed behind. In the 1790s the war with revolutionary France reached the Rhine, and Mannheim itself was fought over in 1795. In 1799, the year the elector Karl Theodor died, this little copper was among the paintings brought from the Mannheim gallery to Munich.