Jan Brueghel the Elder - The Four Windmills

Wenceslaus (or Vaclav) Hollar was born in Prague in 1607, at that time the capital of Bohemia. Hollar began sketching miniatures and maps in his youth. He learned the skills of copper engraving and the technique of etching with subtle gradations of tone and texture. In 1627 he left Prague and spent several years traveling around what is now Germany and Holland and Belgium. By 1636 he was in Cologne when Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, was passing through the city en-route to the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna on a diplomatic mission. He invited Hollar to join his party to record the journey in pictures. The group traveled up the Rhine, through war-torn areas of Germany, back through the Lowlands and on to London. Howard lived at Arundel House on the Strand between London and Westminster and close to the royal palace at Whitehall. Arundel was one of the great connoisseurs and collectors of his time, a patron of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyke, both of whom he had attracted to London. Hollar soon began to make drawings of his adopted homeland Hollar worked on drawings for a catalog that Arundel intended to publish. There was a growing number of merchants, gentry, and aristocrats with an interest in purchasing books published by various printers based around or close to St.Paul’s Cathedral. The Earl of Arundel sent much of his collection to Antwerp while he went into exile in Italy, leaving his London home to be trashed by Parliamentary troops. He died in Padua in 1644. Hollar moved with his family across the North Sea to Antwerp. By 1652 the Civil War in England was over and many royalists returned from exile. Soon, Hollar came back to his adopted homeland where he remained for the rest of his life.

This collection as well as all massive collections on Picryl.com required two steps: First, we picked a manually curated set to train AI vision to recognize windmills, and after that, we run image recognition through all 25M+ images in our database. All media in the collection is in the public domain. There is no limitation on the dataset usage - educational, scientific, or commercial.

Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) was a Flemish painter and draughtsman, best known for his contributions to Dutch and Flemish Baroque painting in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He was born in Brussels, which was then part of the Habsburg Netherlands. Brueghel came from a family of artists; his father was Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a renowned Renaissance painter. Jan Brueghel is often referred to as 'Velvet' Brueghel because of his penchant for using rich, lush colours and intricate detail in his works. He was skilled in painting landscapes, still lifes and allegorical scenes. Jan Brueghel collaborated with other prominent artists of his time, such as Peter Paul Rubens. They worked together on several projects, combining Brueghel's skill in detailed landscapes and still lifes with Rubens' expertise in figures and composition. Some of Brueghel's notable works include 'The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark', 'Flowers in a Wooden Vessel' and 'The Garden of Eden'. His paintings often combined natural elements, animals and religious or mythological themes. Jan Brueghel the Elder's legacy continued through his descendants, as several of his sons also became successful painters, including Jan Brueghel the Younger. His influence on the development of Flemish Baroque art and his contribution to the collaboration between landscape and figure painters of his time are well recognised in art history.