MR E.V. LUCAS AND DISAPPEARING WINDMILLS

Evening Star, Issue 19001, 24 July 1925, Page 12

MR E.V. LUCAS AND DISAPPEARING WINDMILLS

“ The amusing thing is that this lamentation over our disappearing windmills isn’t new. They seem always to have been disappearing, and always to have been mourned,” writes Mr E. V. Lucas, in the 1 Sunday Times.' ‘'As loii£ ago as 1825 John Constable was deploring the destruction oi a. windmill in Dorsetshire. ‘ I am vexed,’ be wrote, ‘ at the fate of the poor old mill. 1 here will soon be an end qf the picturesque in the kingdom and Constable felt doubly, because be was both a miller ami an artist. No picture, it hae been said, with a windmill in it can be wholly a failure; and I am pained to think that the Royal Academicians, recognising the fact, are not officially doing something to preserve mills as features of tiie landscape, even though their sails no longer go round. “In self-defence they should do it. For the most part the windmills that no longer are active arc mere monuments, with their sails missing; and the Royal Academy's first duty would bo to fit them with sails again. They need not go round as Constable's brother, Abram, said that all those in John's pictures could; but they must be there. ‘‘ As for the insides of the mills, they might be fitted out as summer bolt-holes for R.A.s and A.R.A.e, like that little row of residences at Chantilly, just opposite the Chateau, where the Academicians of Franco spend their holidays . The conversion of derelict windmills into weekend residences (with the upper and nether millstones a-s doorsteps) has recently become a cult; but I have never had the opportunity of seeing how habitable they are. They certainly ought to be healthy : kill or cure; and the higher the floor, the move would the wind howl. But eccentric week-enders don’t mind that. “ The only converted windmill that I know, which has a marvellous view of the estuary of the Thames, and is, I believe, an Admiralty landmark, is now a studio. IVhat should be the head and front of a picture, has became the place where pictures arc made; walls that once witnessed the grinding of grain into flour are now perpetually astonished at the efforts of a young artist to create an illusion of reality by means of pigment and brush. Bread, I admit, is the ultimate end both of millers and of painters, but the transformation is none the less a curious experience for the mill."