Emil Pitkin

On the second floor of the National Gallery of Art the Old Dutch and Flemish Masters murmur in their native tongues. You walk up to the fountain underneath the rotunda, you turn left and in the corridor you pass two galleries without looking in. At the third, you glance inside to see if anybody is walking toward you, you let them pass and then you close your eyes and take some measured steps, aiming directly at the back wall and one painting to the left.

You’re inside the Rembrandt gallery, where you are surrounded by 12 of the only 300 Rembrandt paintings extant in the whole world. But today you’ve come for only one. You stand before it with your closed eyes and you remember the uplift of the last time and breathe in very deep because you want every sense taut, and then you open your eyes and feel restored.

The Mill is my favorite painting at the National Gallery of Art in DC. Gunmetal gray cloud in the top-left corner, thick. A few small incidental figures in the at the bottom of the frame: a mother or a governess walking a small child down a sloping path; a young woman crouched over with her washing in the river. In the bottom righthand corner, the stern of a rowboat, a rower and two oars; two more strokes and he’ll make landfall beside the washing girl. You don’t notice any of this until you tell yourself “I will notice everything about this painting.” Because what you see first, and continue to see long after you have left the gallery is a harsh brown cliff, the river curling round it, and atop the cliff, like a statue atop a pedestal, a proud and solitary Dutch windmill.

The foreboding cloud behind it has made way for a clearing sky, some almost-open sky above the windmill’s blades, innocent white clouds filtering clean light over the wood across the river. But the opposite may hold too. Like Franklin who was asked whether the sun’s half disk over the horizon in Independence Hall represented the rising or the setting sun, it is fair to ask whether the storm has given way to the clearing or whether the calm must give way to thunder.

Unapproached and unapproachable, alone against the elements, monumental, the mill dominates the painting. And no wonder. While the governess walks her charge to the river, the man rows, the lady washes, they owe their afternoon to the windmill that has kept the river’s waters from rising high and drowning all of Amsterdam, governess, child, rower, washer, and the rest. From their lowly vantage point, they can’t even see it, maybe forget it, but woe to them if the blades stop spinning. The windmill stands, heralded and unheralded, harnessing nature’s winds to beat back nature’s currents, doing what it must, doing it all it knows.

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