Il mulino

For most of the 20th century, scholars argued about whether Rembrandt painted this at all. By then the picture already had a long fame. In the 18th century it hung in the collection of the Duc d'Orleans in Paris, and English painters crossed the Channel to study it. The doubts came later, and today the attribution to Rembrandt has largely been restored, though not everyone is convinced. It shows a single windmill on a bank above a river, almost all of it sunk in shadow under a heavy, storm-dark sky, with just a rim of light catching the mill's cap and sails. Small figures near the water give you the scale of the thing. It was made in the mid-1640s, and its reputation as a landscape only grew across the 19th century. The painting later crossed the Atlantic and entered the collection that became the National Gallery of Art in Washington.