Windmills near Zaandam

Monet sat out the Franco-Prussian War in London, and on his way home in June 1871 he stopped in the Netherlands, on a tip from the older landscape painter Daubigny, whom he had come to know in exile. He stayed about four months at Zaandam with his wife Camille and their small son and brought back some 20 canvases. The Zaan district was no sleepy countryside. Its windmills, hundreds of them, were factories that sawed timber, pressed oil and ground pigment for the paint trade, and Monet wrote home about houses of every colour and mills by the hundreds. He worked this row of mills on the Westzijderveld polder from a boat, broad strokes standing in for the small waves. Steam engines were already taking the trade off the mills he lined up along that horizon.