File:Windmill on the hill of Montmartre LCCN92500282.jpg

Library of Congress

• Catalog: https://lccn.loc.gov/92500282
• Image download: https://cdn.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3c00000/3c05000/3c05000/3c05038v.jpg
• Original url: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92500282/

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• Title, attribution, date, subject, condition and physical description by Diane de Grazia, 2014.
• Inscriptions: Verso of drawing in black chalk: "Rousseau Windmill" and "Th.R. (5)" and LC stamp with B and 1514. On mat: 9-25-95, Attributed to Georges Michel (1763-1843) by Michel Schulman. Note by "HLK."
• No. 204.
• George Lothrop Bradley Collection, no. LC B 1514.
• Note on mat: "Attributed to Georges Michel (1763-1843) by Michel Schulman, 9-25-95."
• Bequest; George Lothrop Bradley; 1919.
• This drawing of a windmill came to the collection of the Library of Congress with an attribution to Théodore Rousseau, whose drawings it only vaguely resembles. Michel Schulman correctly identified the earlier artist Georges Michel as the author (note on drawing mat). Georges Michel, a precursor to the Barbizon artists, was largely influenced by Dutch landscape painting. Unknown for many years, his works were often confused with other artists. Only in the early twentieth-century with an exhibition in Paris has his work come to be known again (Larguier, Léo, Georges Michel [1763-1843] Paris, Hôtel Jean Charpentier, 1927). Drawings attributed to Michel, many of which are in albums in the Louvre, confirm Schulman's attribution of this sheet to him. Similar use of black chalk, planar recession, shorthand foliage, and flattened, simplified structures occur in most of his works (see, for example, Louvre RF 1758.12 verso [for this and other drawings by Michel see the the Louvre website database for the Département des Arts graphiques]). A drawing in the Louvre of a windmill in black chalk with brown wash reproduces the same windmill (from the hill of Montmartre) from the same angle (Louvre RF 1874.14 recto (Album Michel Georges 1, folio 8) as the drawing in the Library of Congress. The background in the LC drawing is different but the handling of chalk is the same. The Louvre drawing is more fully realized, finished, and taken from a closer perspective. The verso of Louvre RF 1874.14 describes the windmill in three-quarters view. Another drawing in the same album reproduces houses near the windmill, somewhat resembling the houses in our drawing (Louvre RF 1874.15 recto). The verso of Louvre RF 1874.15 also describes houses on the Rue de Montmartre with figures walking along the street. More works in the album (Louvre RF 1758.23 verso and RF 1758.27 recto) give longer views of the hill and a windmill of Montmartre with houses and trees and a fence surrounding the windmill. Further drawings in this album suggest the artist's other wanderings in Paris. The paper of the drawing in the Library of Congress differs from those in the albums in the Louvre but it, too, may have belonged to a small album that the artist carried around the city and environs capturing the landscape on site. Dating of these drawings is difficult, but some of the artist's paintings of the mills of Montmartre are dated approximately to the 1820s due to their precise handling (see one in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg and another in the Art Institute of Chicago dated to this period).
• Condition assessment: Heavy foxing at right; less so at left, 2014.
• Conserved; 08.82.017.11.