Windmill, a small pencil sketch from Kenyon’s “Holland” sketchbook, is a typical example of the sure touch and clear eye that he had developed in the years since the early drawings catalogued here. (see for example catalogue numbers 1 and 2).

This one, like all of Kenyon’s drawings, is even more diminished than his small oil sketches; often these notations are even smaller, being executed on any loose bit of paper he could lay his hands on, including envelope backs and old receipts. This windmill-dominated landscape is placed high on the sheet so that the foreground forms begin just below the middle of the page. The effect of this placement is to suggest that the stream that runs by the windmill has flooded the foreground, causing the image to float. There is in this effect a Whistlerian quality, and it is the one aspect of oriental influence that will survive in Kenyon’s work, since many of his sketches have this floating effect… as if there is a focal plane beyond which forms dissolve, causing one to be most aware of the fact that these are drawings on paper.

Windmills was probably executed, like the drawing, in the late 1890s. Here Kenyon finds himself in a flat landscape somewhat akin to the marshes at Ipswich. But, instead of the modest haystack, he has looming before him two great windmills. The one nearest at hand dominates the scene but is echoed by its distant neighbor. The long low buildings out of which the windmill rises formally relate to the horizontality of the landscape, while the summarily indicated row of trees at the horizon visually connects the two mills. The windmills sit, then, well above the horizon line with the largest set off by a great glowing cloud as if to identify the sails with the sky and winds that give it purpose. The greens of the foreground carry up into the building and the mill itself, for the shadows here are dark green while the sails are a middle shade of green that is also found in the grasses below. The reddish roof of the shed is a striking bright note, but this, too, is harmonized with related tints in the clouds and at the edge of the stream. A strong rendering of light and dark contrast serves not only to reveal the structure of the windmill but to make the painting as a whole give off a sense of brilliant light.

HR Kenyon – all rights reserved

In just the opposite vein is a night study, Etaples in Moonlight. Here again a windmill figures, but this time as a ghostly ruddy silhouette looming above the horizon in the distance. The foreground, which occupies the lower half of this small panel, consists of a waste of wet sand, mud, and pools left by the ebb tide. Freely painted, it has a murky wetness that catches gleaming bits of light from the rosy rising moon, the duller sky tones of blue and purple touched with green. The anchored boats that have been pulled by the outgoing tide to point away from the unseen sea create a pattern of dark accents, their masts all tilting at the same angle opposing the slope of the gentle hill behind them. Touches of light and a building that is barely visible by the bank give points of subtle articulation to this rust-toned slope. Dull as the light is, it has a quiet sense of life.