Windmill and Boats near Zaandam

In 1871 Monet was a war refugee. He had waited out the Franco-Prussian War in London, and rather than head straight home he took the advice of the older painter Daubigny, a friend, and stopped in Holland, in the small town of Zaandam near Amsterdam. He stayed about four months and came back with roughly two dozen canvases. This is one of them, a working stretch of water with boats and one of the windmills that drained and milled the low Dutch land. What caught him was the light on all that water and open sky, the same thing that had drawn Dutch painters here for centuries. He sold almost none of these Zaandam scenes at the time. This one reached its museum in Copenhagen, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, only in 1986.