Painted in 1884, Le Moulin à l’eau was executed when the artist was living with his parents in Nuenen. On December 4, 1883, Van Gogh set off on foot from Drenthe for his parent’s house in Nuenen where, still in turmoil after separating from Sien Hoornik, a pregnant washerwoman with whom he had been closely involved, he sought to seek solace and re-evaluate his art: “I thought that being at home again might give me a more accurate insight into the question of what I should do” (letter 475). Many of his landscapes from this period depict dark and solitary buildings that appear to reflect the isolation he was feeling following the break-up. Van Gogh remained in Brabant for almost two years using his parent’s mangle room as a studio while closely studying the landscape and the impoverished local populace for whom he felt such sympathy. During this period Van Gogh also depicted peasants at work, particularly weavers, and the watermill’s connotations of labor is emphasized here by the inclusion of figures bent under sacks. Through this early work, the viewer bears witness to the machinations of a master painter in his formative years regarding both technique and subject matter.

Van Gogh’s Dutch roots had an immeasurable impact on his art. Since his arrival in The Hague in 1881, his technique was largely shaped by the styles of the myriad artists and schools that flourished in the region at the time, in particular The Hague School to which he was introduced by Anton Mauve, his cousin by marriage. He gradually developed a unique and evocative take on realism, further influenced by the French Barbizon school, English and Continental wood engravers and, most importantly, certain Dutch old masters. As George S. Keyes elaborates: “For Van Gogh these sources of inspiration intermingled and merged as he drew upon them to shape his own art. He could focus on each for its perceived modernity and topicality, yet also recognize how these sources could equally and simultaneously relate to the past. For him the Dutch old masters seemed truly modern, and Vincent conflated them and their supposed naturalism with that of the Barbizon and Hague Schools and with his own endeavors as an artist. The Dutch old masters represented something else of extraordinary significance to Van Gogh—a sense of the continuity of Dutch culture and a harking back to a truer, simpler world of shared values as opposed to the fragmented reality of modern, industrialized society. This was a utopian construct superimposed by Van Gogh on the tradition as he perceived it. The tradition as he chose to understand it focused on several themes: the edifying portrait; the peasant wedded to the agrarian tradition of the land as a mainstay of the social order; representations of landscape showing mankind in harmony with nature; and a perceived naturalism that expressed the truth. These points buttressed Van Gogh’s assumption that there is a continuum between past and present and enabled him to embrace traditional subject matters as a valid concern for modern art” (G. S. Keyes, Van Gogh Face to Face, The Portraits (exhibition catalogue), Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, 2000, p. 26).

Le Moulin à l’eau is mentioned in one of Van Gogh’s letters from May 29, 1884 to his friend and fellow Dutch artist, Anthon van Rappard where he writes, “Since you left I’ve been working on a Water mill – the one I asked about in that little inn at the station, where we sat talking with that man whom I told you seemed to suffer from a chronic shortage of small change in his pocket.  It’s the same sort of thing as the two other water mills that we visited together, but with two red roofs, and which one views square on from the front – with poplars around it.  Will be magnificent in the autumn” (letter 448).