Windmill in Holland

Catalogue identity

The work catalogued here is a landscape painting titled Windmill in Holland, a title that also circulates in French as Moulin en hollande and in German as Mühle, Holland. These three forms, English, French and German, belong to the single record for the object; they are title variants rather than separate works, and the alternation between them reflects the bilingual and international description practices of the cataloguing institution and the languages of the artist's career. The painting is attributed to Wassily Kandinsky and dated 1904. The attribution is recorded as an attribution in the source record, and the date is given as 1904 in the artist and date fields of that record. Both the attribution and the date belong to the catalogue entry for the object, not to a signature, inscription or document transcribed in the supplied evidence.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904, File title and labels; Artist and Date fields)

The 1904 date is the date assigned to the painting in its catalogue record. It is not the date of the catalogue entry, of the reference photograph, or of the digital surrogate through which the image is now circulated. Keeping these dates distinct matters because the object record, the image file and the reproductions derived from it each have their own histories, and only the first of these is the object date of 1904. The evidence supplied here establishes the object as a 1904 work under the title Windmill in Holland, with the alternative titles Moulin en hollande and Mühle, Holland, and does not attribute that date to the making of any of the later records. The distinction is small but consequential for how the object is cited: the work is a 1904 painting, while the catalogue descriptions of it are modern instruments of documentation.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904, File title and labels; Artist and Date fields; Source/Photographer and License fields)

The work is a landscape painting titled Windmill in Holland, also known as Moulin en hollande and Mühle, Holland.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904)

The painting is attributed to Wassily Kandinsky and dated 1904.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904)

What the record establishes about the scene

Visual observation

The supplied record describes the painting as a landscape showing a windmill in Holland, and the object carries the title Windmill in Holland, appearing in French as Moulin en hollande and in German as Mühle, Holland. Those titles and the recorded genre are the firm ground for any visual account. The evidence establishes the subject category, a landscape with a windmill, and the geographic association implied by the title. It does not establish the number of windmills, their placement, the presence or absence of figures, water, buildings, flowers or weather, nor does it record a palette, a horizon line or a compositional structure. Descriptions of village life, a canal and flowers therefore cannot be presented here as documented observations of this painting. The visual analysis has to begin from the windmill landscape as a titled subject and acknowledge that the detailed look of the sheet is not captured in the available documentation.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904, Title and Genre fields)

The painting is a landscape showing a windmill in Holland.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904)

Documented support and dimensions

The supplied record describes Windmill in Holland as tempera on paper, measuring 34.7 by 50.3 centimetres. Both the medium and the dimensions are catalogued facts, recorded in the same registration that attributes the landscape to Wassily Kandinsky and dates it 1904. No technical examination report is among the evidence: nothing here records the paper's weight, texture, chain lines or watermark, and nothing records pigment analysis, binder sampling, surface microscopy or conservation treatment. The account of materials therefore rests on the catalogue entry alone, and any further statement about how the sheet was prepared or what specific colourants were used would go beyond what is documented. The one physical consequence the measurements do support is one of format: at roughly thirty-five by fifty centimetres the work is a modest sheet, the scale of a study or small independent composition on paper rather than a large canvas.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904, Medium and Dimensions fields)

Visual observation

Tempera on paper situates the work within the graphic and small-format side of early twentieth-century practice, where paper served as a support for works carried out in media other than oil, including the opaque water-based paints that catalogue language often groups under tempera. Because the entry specifies paper rather than canvas or board, the sheet itself is the primary support, and the painted image sits directly upon it; the evidence does not say whether the exposed paper remains visible at the edges, whether the sheet was mounted, or whether any sizing or ground intervenes between paper and paint. These are exactly the questions that a technical study would answer, and their absence is a qualification on the material account rather than a gap to be filled by assumption. The distinction matters because the visual impression of the painting, a Dutch landscape with a windmill, cannot by itself establish how many layers, if any, lie between the paper and the visible surface.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904, Medium and Dimensions fields; Title and Genre fields)

Materials and the visible subject

Interpretation

What can be seen and what is documented meet at the subject: the entry describes the work as a landscape showing a windmill in Holland, and the title fields in French and German, Moulin en hollande and Mühle, Holland, name the same motif. The visible elements of a canal, village life and flowers belong to the catalogue description of the scene, not to technical analysis of the paint. A materials-based reading therefore has to keep two registers separate: the composition is known from description of the image, while the physical making is known only from the medium and dimension fields. Within that limit, the pairing of a landscape subject with tempera on paper is coherent with the period before Kandinsky's abstract work, when he was still working with recognizable landscape motifs, as the 1904 date indicates. The choice of paper and a water-based medium does not in itself determine the appearance of the Dutch scene, but it does place the object in the world of portable, quickly worked sheets rather than in the tradition of large oil landscapes.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904, Medium and Dimensions fields; Title and Genre fields)

The work is tempera on paper, measuring 34.7 by 50.3 centimetres.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904)

The Documented Record

The documented record for Windmill in Holland, also titled Moulin en hollande and Mühle, Holland, fixes the work as a landscape by Wassily Kandinsky dated 1904, executed in tempera on paper at 34.7 by 50.3 centimetres. The painting is held by the Musée National d'Art Moderne, part of the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou in Paris, under accession number AM 81-65-84. For a provenance account, these identifiers are the anchor points: the accession number is the object's stable administrative identity within the Paris collection, while the three language variants of the title record how the work has been named across French and German publication contexts as well as English.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904, Source/Photographer and License fields)

Chronology can be stated only at its two secure ends. The work carries a date of 1904, the year of its making as recorded for the painting, and it is now documented in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris under accession number AM 81-65-84. The supplied evidence does not set out any intermediate owner, dealer, sale, gift, bequest or transfer between those points. That absence must be read as an unrecorded interval, not as a proven continuity of ownership: nothing in the record establishes that the painting passed directly from the artist to the Paris museum, and nothing establishes that it changed hands at all. The provenance history of this object, as far as the supplied evidence goes, is a making date, a present repository and an accession identifier, with the intervening decades left open.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904, Source/Photographer and License fields)

Interpretation

The accession number AM 81-65-84 is the most precise provenance datum available. Its form encodes the museum's own registration practice rather than any narrative of ownership: it identifies the object within the holdings of the Musée National d'Art Moderne and would be the reference used for any inquiry into acquisition files, gallery records or loan history held by the Centre Pompidou. The evidence does not supply the date or mechanism behind that number, so it should not be read as evidence of an acquisition in any particular year. What it does establish is that the painting's documented institutional life belongs to the Paris museum, and that any future reconstruction of the missing interval must be built outward from that registration record.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904, Source/Photographer and License fields)

Reproduction and Rights

A separate strand of the record concerns the image rather than the object. The reproduction is credited to Google Arts & Culture and released as public domain. This is a rights statement about the photograph and its distribution, not a claim about the legal status of the painting itself, and it should not be conflated with ownership. Its practical effect for research is that the work can be studied and reproduced from that digital surrogate without permission barriers, which is why the visual evidence of the Dutch landscape, with its windmill, village life, canal and flowers, circulates so widely even though the documentary trail of the physical object remains thin.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904, Source/Photographer and License fields)

The image is credited to Google Arts & Culture and released as public domain.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904)

Collection and accession

Windmill in Holland is recorded as belonging to the Musée National d'Art Moderne, part of the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou in Paris, where it carries the accession number AM 81-65-84. This single institutional fact is the strongest documented element in the collection record supplied for the work: the accession number fixes the painting to a specific public collection, and the museum identity places it within the national modern art museum of France rather than in a private holding or an unidentified location. Because the supplied record gives no acquisition date, donor, purchase history or earlier provenance, the object's route into the museum and its whereabouts before accession remain undocumented here and should not be inferred from the accession number alone, even though such numbers are sometimes read as encoding a year of entry.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904, Collection and Accession number fields)

The painting belongs to the Musée National d'Art Moderne, part of the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou in Paris, with accession number AM 81-65-84.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904)

Valuation status

Interpretation

The only valuation evidence supplied for Wassily Kandinsky's Windmill in Holland, also recorded under the French title Moulin en hollande and the German Mühle, Holland, is a model-generated working insurance range of US$3M to US$9M, recorded as a working calculation generated 2026-10-30. The document is explicit about its own limits: it is a broad, conservative working range derived only from the confirmed context in the supplied source excerpt, not from any official museum object record, appraisal, comparable sale, auction result, or private insurance data. The record states plainly that no such material was supplied or used, and that the range depends on unverified identification details and must be replaced by a professional valuation before any insurance or financial use. The range is also described as intentionally wide in order to support manual review. Within the accumulating account of this object, then, the figure is best treated as a documented artifact of a valuation exercise and its stated method, not as a market price or an institutional estimate.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904)

The calculation's own methodology explains how the range was assembled from identifying facts: attribution to Kandinsky, a date of 1904, tempera on paper, dimensions of 34.7 by 50.3 centimetres, and collection at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, under accession number AM 81-65-84. In the document's stated reasoning, the artist's prominence, the early date within a formative period before his mature abstraction, and museum collection status indicating a documented acquisition path support the estimate, while the modest scale and the works-on-paper medium discount it. This is the calculation's own methodological account rather than an attributed scholarly judgment about the picture, and it carries the explicit qualification that the range is a working estimate for manual review only. The same identification facts, including the title variants, medium, dimensions and accession number, are independently recorded on the Wikimedia Commons file page for the work, whose image is credited to Google Arts & Culture and released as public domain. The valuation document and the object record therefore rest on the same identification, so doubt about that identification would propagate into both.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904)

What the record supports

What the object record establishes is narrower and firmer than a value: a landscape showing a windmill in Holland, attributed to Wassily Kandinsky and dated 1904, executed in tempera on paper at 34.7 by 50.3 centimetres, and held by the Musée National d'Art Moderne, part of the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou in Paris, accession AM 81-65-84. The Wikimedia Commons page records the title variants Windmill in Holland, Moulin en hollande and Mühle, Holland, and describes the scene as a Dutch landscape with village life, a canal and flowers. No official valuation, appraisal, sale result or comparable appears among the supplied evidence, and the model-generated range explicitly disclaims being any of these. Keeping those categories apart matters for the material history of such a work: an accession number documents custodial status within a public collection, and a 2026 working insurance figure documents a planning exercise, but neither substitutes for a provenance record or a professional appraisal. The account should preserve that gap rather than fill it with a number treated as established fact.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904)

Working estimate

Calculated working insurance estimate, not a sale price: Working insurance range: US$3M to US$9M Recorded date: Working calculation, generated 2026-10-30. Methodology: This is a broad, conservative working range derived only from the confirmed context in the supplied source excerpt. The work is attributed to Wassily Kandinsky, dated 1904, and described as tempera on paper measuring 34.7 cm by 50.3 cm, an early landscape from a formative period before his mature abstraction. It is recorded as held by the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, with accession number AM 81-65-84, indicating museum collection status and a documented acquisition path. Because the excerpt supplies no official valuation, appraisal, sale result, or comparables, the range is a cautious order-of-magnitude benchmark reflecting the artist's prominence and the work's early date and museum context, while discounting for the modest scale and works-on-paper medium. The range is intentionally wide to support manual review and should be replaced by a professional valuation before any insurance decision. Qualification: This is a model-generated working range for manual review only. It is not an official insurance value, appraisal, auction estimate, auction result, or sale price. No official museum object record, appraisal, comparable sale, or private insurance data was supplied or used. The range depends on unverified identification details and must be confirmed by a qualified professional before any insurance or financial use.(Wikimedia Commons: Windmill in Holland, 1904)