The Mill (Dixmuden)

The Mill (Dixmuden) is a Flemish landscape color woodblock print by Yoshijiro Urushibara, depicting a windmill at Diksmuide, a town in West Flanders in Belgium that, like Bruges and Ypres, became a recurring subject in his European output. Urushibara worked primarily in London from 1908 until the late 1930s and travelled regularly on the Continent, and his Belgian and French subjects grew out of the same milieu that produced the Frank Brangwyn collaboration: a circle of British and European artists drawn to the canal towns and weathered architecture of the Low Countries. The composition centres a tall windmill against an open sky, its sails and tower constructed from broad blocks of warm and cool colour rather than the linear hatching of an etching, and Urushibara uses the unprinted paper to suggest the diffuse light of the Flemish coast. The print exemplifies the London Japanese woodblock idiom he helped establish, in which the materials and workshop discipline of Tokyo hanga were applied to subjects entirely outside the traditional Japanese pictorial canon. Each impression was hand-pulled by Urushibara himself, with the pigments mixed in his own studio, which is part of why surviving impressions vary subtly in tone and registration. The image record for this print is preserved on the Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System through ukiyo-e.org, where it is catalogued among Urushibara's untitled or loosely titled European landscape series and stands as an example of how he adapted woodblock printing to capture Northern European architecture under Northern European light.