Let’s continue along the stream. The path beautifully adorned with willows leads to the millrace of Ohain, whose dikes overlook a multitude of meadows.

Let’s go around the miller’s house to admire the mill. Its enormous mossy wheel, set in motion by a waterfall of more than six meters, turns at the base of a gable supported by a cobblestone. It is a delight to stroll in this solitary corner, especially when one can hear the mill rattling its song. (1.)

A pleasing view of an old mill by the Belgian pictorialist photographer Marcel Vanderkindere. In 1908, a critic writing about the 7th Exhibition of the Belgian Photography Association several years after this photograph was exhibited remarked about the artists large bromide prints, mentioning his Old Mill, taken in the village of Ohain in Belgium:

The criticism I addressed to the bromide applies perfectly to the large prints of Mr. Vanderkindere. How much I prefer his small platinum paintings, the Irises, the Roses, to his somewhat flat prints, lacking vigor, like the Old Mill. Why not reproduce such a motif, which is excellent, with gum? There you go! it is that not everyone can work with gum, unfortunately.  (2.) (translated)

Marcel Vanderkindere: 1865-1941

“In M. M. Vanderkindere Belgium possesses a pictorial worker of high rank, both as regards technique and artistic taste. In his pictures, which are chiefly landscapes, one finds much of the same qualities which distinguish those of Mr. Horsley Hinton and other English pictorialists of the same school. There is a similar effective grouping of materials not too promising in themselves, the same skilful lighting, and the same sentiment and poetic feeling. Several works we remember bear evident traces of the ” English School of Landscape Photography,” which is frankly admitted by many leading Belgian workers to ” embrace a fine sense of the beautiful in nature, restrained within truly pictorial limits by a skilful use of both material and a sure handling of tone values.” In both the examples of M. Vanderkindere’s work which have been reproduced herein the qualities to which we have drawn attention are present in a satisfying degree, although reproductions, however carefully made, cannot always do full justice to pictures which rely so much for their charm upon the nuance of the original.” (3.)

1.  Arthur Cosyn: excerpt: chapter 23, La Lasne et L’Ohain: from: Le Brabant Inconnu, Bruxelles: 1911, p. 290

2. Association Belge de Photographie Bulletin: 1908: p. 259

3. Clive Holland, Pictorial Photography in Belgium, from “Art in Photography”, with selected examples of European and American Work. Edited by Charles Holme, offices of “The Studio”, London, Paris and New York: 1905  p. B4