The artist Frank Brangwyn is famous for his cheerful watercolour and ink scenes of windmills, alongside which his annotations describe the long-lost peaceful arcadia of the mills’ pasts, contrasting them harshly with the stark reality of their present-day fate of ruin and decline.
The emotive descriptions against which Brangwyn contrasts his paintings often tell stories of the unexpected, somewhat macabre past that lies behind the mills. These are stories that one would never guess at on first glance at the idyllic rural scenes – for example, the dispute caused by the discovery of a dead body on the site of a mill!
The title of this blog comes from Brangwyn’s poetic caption to his painting of St Leonard’s post mill in Winchelsea, East Sussex. Follow the link below to the Gems of the Archive article to find out why his impression of the mill was so fatalistic, and discover how Brangwyn caused much controversy himself – one of his paintings even prompting the German Kaiser to put a price on his head!