Inspired by Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819-1891) – Mill in Rotterdam – Black stone / Watercolour – 5 x 7 inch

Marion is locked in her room. She is grounded.

Her high school years are far from fun. She can’t concentrate, she hates the people in her class. Suddenly, her grades are in freefall. And her parents have found nothing better than to deprive her of video games until further notice. So without a phone, without internet… Marion is bored to death. No way that she reviews anything. No, no and no, definitely not.

As she searches through her mother’s desk drawer looking for a four-color pen, she stumbles upon an old, rather thick piece of paper. Intrigued, she takes it out, turns it over and…. Ohhh, it’s a watercolor. She somehow deciphers the signature, she reads “Sidranne”. Well, that’s weird, she doesn’t know who it is.

That’s when her mother comes home from work. Marion takes the opportunity to ask her the question. In fact, it is the grandmother of her mother who was a painter and who had given it to her when she was home because she had loved this drawing. She always kept it close to her. It had been a long time since she had taken it in her hands. She is overwhelmed.

Marion sees a windmill and houses in the foreground. It’s after a Dutch painter Jongkind, her mother told her. Your great-grandmother was very fond of this painter. To chill she was inspired by him for her watercolors.

For the record, windmills are the symbol of the Netherlands, mostly built in the 16th and 17th centuries. At the height of the period, they numbered more than 10,000 in action across the country. Then they disappeared with the arrival of steam, gasoline and electricity. They were mainly used for flood prevention and little for grinding grain. Thanks to the wind, which activated a system that worked like a pump, the mills evacuated the water behind the dykes and thus served to dry up the marshes and the land reclaimed from the sea. Once these lands were dried up, the inhabitants could cultivate them.

Marion is also overwhelmed. She decides to hang the watercolor on the wall of her bedroom.

Since then, Marion has been at the top of her class and every day has become a real pleasure to learn…