Getty Museum

Windmills on a Canal

Date

about 1790–1800

Medium

Watercolor and pen and brown ink

Culture

Dutch

Department

Drawings

Institution

Getty Museum

Erkelens applied colored wash to make his depiction of typical Dutch windmills and farmhouses more picturesque. Here the low horizon line and the use of atmospheric perspective capture the seeming endlessness of the Dutch terrain. The layering of colored wash together with the scintillating reflections on the water lend the sheet an exceptional freshness and vibrancy. Until recently Erkelens's small body of drawings was thought to be the work of an earlier, seventeenth-century artist in Rembrandt's circle. The artist's mistaken identity is testament to the extent to which Dutch eighteenth-century draftsmen imitated their predecessors.

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