The Watermill

The mill in this picture is still standing. The Louvre identifies it, along with the other mills in the background, with the ones Gerhard Sloet built or restored from 1652 on his estate of Singraven, on the river Dinkel near Denekamp in Overijssel, close to the German border. Hobbema painted these mills more than once, and related versions hang in London, Ottawa and Minneapolis, but the Louvre's catalogue finds this one the most faithful to the actual site. The museum dates it to the end of the 1660s.

Hobbema signed it on the wooden fence at the lower right. It may once have had a companion piece, now in Washington, and the two travelled together for decades, bought in Amsterdam in 1788 and sold together in London in 1823 and again in 1832, before they parted in 1833. The Louvre bought this one in 1861 from Baron von Witzleben, an heir of the Paris collector Baron von Mecklenburg.