Miller Loses Windmill, An Antique Art Print Engraving.
Artist: A. C. Gow. Engraver: J. C. Armytage. Print Title: Miller Loses Windmill. Print Date: This engraving was printed in 1885. Print Size: Overall print size is 9 inches by 12 inches including the white boarders. The actual print size is 7 inches by 10 1/2 inches. Print Paper: The paper qualith is woven rag stock paper. The Original Description: Among the many words which the wise have used from time to time to express the transfer of property against the wish of the owner, one or two have had a special use of circumstance and time. Very large operations, some twenty-five years ago, had the diplomatic name of rectification of frontier, or the franker one of annexation; and during the Franco-German War the orders for those smaller sacrifices which private right is constrained to make the general claim, came under the term of "requisition." The word was turned into barbarous verbs and participles, as a useful word is apt to be, and it was terrible to others than grammarians. The rustic mind especially was incredulous as to the final effect of the official receipts for goods surrendered which the Teutonic invader was so punctual in presenting; and a sense of the sacredness of personal property is to be expected from a miller. His good consist of that elementary form of riches in which the idea of possession is not constantly confused by merely representative and arbitrary coin. The man who brings wheat into his workshop, and by the operation of the simple forces of the winds sends it out as flour, is rich in a sense profoundly natural, simple, and lawful. He might, indeed be pardoned for boasting if such riches. If no man may be pruse-proud, let us agree that haeal-bag pride should be accounted a venial sin. Mr. Gow's miller is hard to convince, but argument is a matter of form on the part of his visitors, and will not be prolonged. From afar the hussars have seen the great arms of his windmill turning against the horizon sky, and have spurred across the open land towards its useful treasury. The artist, by the way, has denied himself the always pictorial effect of the body of a mill, with its shadow-throwing arms and sails, for he gives little but the piers and props, the little forest of timber supports, and the ladder steps of the stem. Perhaps it is to association that the windmill owes much of its charm; for until the painter of the period succeeds in making us renounce all our senses but the sense of seeing, association will still have power. And we associate the idea of a windmill with that of a flat wide country in which the gales go free, in which the sky may be seen in all its immensity and in all its gradation of color and light, and on which the suns and moons rise clear up from the very limits of the world. The mill reminds us of the walls of Flemish towns and of the dykes that bound the flowering fields of Hoillard-of landscape that is free from the effectiveness of scenery. We associate it too with that always beautiful industry in which little or nothing comes between nature and the strength of man, and which is concerned with the satisfaction of wants, and not with that of artificial demands.
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