Code: 6072
Dimensions:
A beautiful and important French oil on canvas from around 1900 which depicts the Moulins du Pont du Vieux Marché, in Meaux, 40 km northeast of Paris.
These stunning and architecturally important flour mills, with their beautiful wood-sided facades and stilts on the Marne River, all burned down in a huge blaze on 16 June 1920.
Our painting, executed just a few years before the awful event, is therefore not only beautiful, but also of important historical significance.
Artist: Adolphe Jeandry (French, 19th/20th century)
Title: Meaux, Les Vieux Moulins
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 19 x 23 inches (48 x 58 cm) including the frame
The historic water mills (moulins) of Meaux on the Marne River were established on the Pont du Marché as early as the 7th century, though they were destroyed and rebuilt multiple times, with prominent structures dating from the 13th to 16th centuries.
In a passage of his Bohemian Galante, Gérard de Nerval describes them as follows: “Let’s go wander on the banks of the Marne and along these terrible water mills whose memory has disturbed my sleep. These mills slay, so dark and so noisy in the moonlight, must be full of charm to the rays of the rising sun.”
Georges Gassies, in his article by the Publicator of the Borough of Meaux of June 19, 1920 noted: “The old mills had escaped in the First World War five years of unprecedented vicissitudes, the bombs that destroyed entire cities, and in a few hours, in full peace, they perished, without anything being done to save them.”
If they were rebuilt in 1567, no one considered their profitable reconstruction in 1920 useful; the time of the water mills was definitely over.
