A year after his 1838 trip to the Netherlands, Cooke exhibited several paintings at the British Institution of a windmill atop Leiden’s city wall once said to have been owned by Rembrandt‘s family, the van Rhijns. Although Cooke was misinformed, and this mill (now long since gone) was not the actual Rembrandt mill, the painting is a peephole into an early Victorian understanding of Rembrandt’s life and technique, then highly influential on British painters. Cooke here used umbrous tones and strongly directional lighting, but retained his own wet, oily palette and polished finish.

Cooke had a taste for depicting accurate technical details, and his Mill is at once a carefully observed record of the gearing and machinery of an old mill, and a tribute to a great artist. Employing the idiom of the picturesque in the decaying brickwork scarred wood and deeply worn tread above the ladder, Cooke stresses the passage of time and continuity of human usage. Light comes on the scene through a single small window, and is diffused over the objects inside, in a way which Cooke might have learned from studying Rembrandt’s prints.

(Sunshine and Shadow, catalogue to the exhibition, National Gallery of Scotland, 1991)