Village View with Watermills on a Pond

Author: Albert J. Elen

A small village is seen from a hill top, with a distant view toward a town on the horizon. A path leads to the edge of the hill, where two travellers arrive, seen on the back, their right arms raised as if in greeting or gaining balance. They start descending towards a small bridge at lower right which leads to a gate. A high slope with a tree on top serves as a side wing in the left foreground; another, behind the village on the right, creates distance in the centre plan where houses are standing on the far side of a pond fed by a stream coming from the right.

As Franz (1965) already observed, this part of the composition was copied from Albrecht Dürer’s well-known coloured drawing The Willow Mill (1496-1498), now in Paris (ill. 1).¹ Dürer’s landscape, however, is flat and shows a stream diagonally from left to right, no pond, the view dominated by two monumental tall willow trees on the right. In neither drawing a mill can be distinguished, but Dürer’s drawing, annotated ‘weidenmull’ in his own hand, is a topographic view of two watermills on the river Pegnitz, which flows through his native Nuremberg. The fragile wooden bridge in Dürer’s drawing, essential to cross the river, was also copied by Bol. The artist succeeded in making an attractive drawing by creating wings to close the composition, taking an elevated position and adding a distant view. It would be interesting to know where Bol saw the watercolour by Dürer, which must at that time have been in a private collection in Malines or Antwerp. Franz (1965) surmises that Bol had a drawn copy after Dürer’s drawing at his disposal.

A characteristic feature in Bol’s landscape drawings is the representation of the sky with parallel hatchings, the clouds sketched in outlines and shaded in similar hatchings. As in some other drawings, a low sun, either rising or setting, is indicated by a bow of rays. Generally, a solitary tree dominates the foreground in the centre or on the side, serving as a repoussoir to create depth and sometimes as a backdrop for a biblical scene. The rendering of the foliage by tiny loops (‘lusjes’) and shading with short parallel hatchings is another of Bol’s hall marks.

The partly cut-off monogram and date 1579 at the top edge, which differ from Bol’s known handwriting, are considered to be false by Franz (1965), who dates the drawing earlier, probably 1567.² However, the inscribed date may very well be correct, possibly repeating an original inscribed date (and signature) which was removed when the sheet was cropped up at an early stage. Moreover, Bol used this drawing only three years later when he made a coloured version on parchment (laid down on panel), dated 1582, now at Harvard.³ In this somewhat smaller gouache Bol made some adjustments, replacing the two travellers with a group of four figures conversing, adding two seated travellers with a dog, more figures in the left background and two fishermen in a boat on the pond.