A moonlit landscape with a windmill and figures by a lake

Dated 1646, this painting is a superlative early example of the distinctive moonlit river scenes that characterized much of Aert van der Neer’s artistic production from the mid-1640s on. The prominent inclusion of a windmill at right likewise features in a number of other paintings datable to the same year, including the artist’s compositionally similar Landscape with a windmill in The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (fig. 1). In the Hermitage painting, van der Neer achieved his light effects through the layering of lighter colored pigments; here, he cleverly employed the butt end of his brush to scratch into the still-wet paint, thereby revealing the ochre-colored ground. A similarly inventive approach to the use of the ground layers is found in a number of van der Neer’s most successful compositions, among them the Moonlit landscape with bridge from circa 1648-50 (National Gallery of Art, Washington).
In the first half of the twentieth century, this painting was part of the famed Beit collection. The collection included such masterpieces as Johannes Vermeer’s Woman writing a letter, with her maid; Gabriel Metsu’s Woman reading a letter and Man writing a letter; and Jacob van Ruisdael’s The Castle of Bentheim (all National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin).