Does anyone recognise this windmill? It's supposedly a painting by DH Lawrence that I was given a postcard of. The watercolour painting is dated 1906-08 so it could be local or maybe when he was on holiday on the east coast. Mysteriously, it is part of the University of Nottingham's DHL collection but it appears online attributed to other, possibly Polish or Austrian, artists.
UPDATE - the other versions are slightly different (see pics) so I wonder if DHL painted his watercolour from another picture? He definitely did that with other paintings of his from about this period when he was young and learning to paint. Carolyn Melbourne at the DHL Birthplace Museum confirms... "Yes, Lawrence painted this. He used other painter's works and postcards to copy from quite a bit."
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| c.1900 - Strelley Mill Courtesy of Peter Deakes Strelley FB Group |
It's quite similar to another postcard from c.1901 of the windmill at Dartford Brent, same composition but reversed...
Other Paintings Recreated By DHL
"As for Greiffenhagen’s Idyll, it moves me almost as if I were in love myself".
"Walker Street gives way to Lynn croft Road where, at Number 97, the Lawrence family lived from 1902 to 1910. Some years back neighbors at Number 99 found what they thought were two slate paintings by Lawrence hidden away in their fireplace."
This article in the Notts Evening Post from July 27th 1966 also talks about possibly the same discovery but only mentions one painting. Unfortunately this painting seems to have vanished from the archives. Hopefully it will resurface at some stage...
As stated in the article "Tom Cooper", a flute and piccolo player, was DH Lawrence's next door neighbour on Lyncroft and an inspiration for one of his lesser known but adventurous characters, Aaron Sisson from the novel Aaron's Rod. His daughters were great friends of young DHL and his family and one of them, Gertrude, lived with his sister Ada for many years in Ripley. The young friends studied went on adventures and outings together were known by the nickname the Pagans...
"The Pagans was a name adopted by a group of Lawrence's friends; Franky and Grit were Frances and Gertrude Cooper, who lived next door at Lynn Croft, in the house that was to serve Lawrence as a model for Aaron's residence in Aaron's Rod. Indeed, the girls father, Thomas Cooper, was to be used for at least the outward aspects of Aaron in that novel. Like Aaron. Tom Cooper was a sensitive musician, a flautist and piccolo player; and like Aaron he was a checkweighman, that is, a man employed by the miners (later under government requirement) to oversee the master's weighing. Thomas Cooper had taken up this kind of work because it paid him more than he had earned teaching at the National School. Lawrence, when he first moved to what is now 97 Lynn Croft, would at night hear Tom Cooper's flute piping away next door; twenty years later, Lawrence had Aaron Sisson take his flute and leave that plain little house for a life of adventurous wanderings such as Tom Cooper would never know." from Harry T. Moore The Intelligent Heart.
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| DHL in his true colours. Colourised by Gavin Gillespie |
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| Original as taken by London photographers Elliott & Fry, half-plate glass negative, circa 1915 |
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Notes and sources
https://watnallhall.blogspot.com/2024/05/eastwoods-proposed-dh-lawrence-memorial.html
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