The Windmill

Sybil Andrews

1933 · Color linocut on Japanese paper · Drawings and Prints

Andrews often focused on the natural elements, particularly in pastoral settings. The Windmill conveys nature’s magnificent power and its potential for both production and destruction, a duality also seen in Nevinson’s The Blue Wave. Harnessing nature and revealing its extraordinary force, a large windmill dominates the composition; the spiky forms of its blades are echoed in the knife-like shadows on the ground and seem to refract into the splintered blue-and-white sky. Its image is echoed in the smaller form behind it, which resembles a pinwheel or flower. The windmill was one Andrews knew well as it was located in the Suffolk town of Woolpit, near her hometown of Bury St Edmunds. The same windmill also features in an early work by Cyril Power, Elmers Mill, Woolpit (ca. 1925), believed to be his first linocut.

Artist

Sybil Andrews

Date

1933

Medium

Color linocut on Japanese paper

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Purchase, Leslie and Johanna Garfield Gift, Lila Acheson Wallace, Charles and Jessie Price, and David T Schiff Gifts, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, Dolores Valvidia Hurlburt Bequest, Peco Foundation and Friends of Drawings and Prints Gifts, and funds from various donors, 2019