The Mill is one of those few paintings that are significant not only because they are beautiful but because they have profoundly influenced the history of taste. As part of important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections, The Mill was well known to connoisseurs and artists who valued it as one of Rembrandt's greatest creations. The romantic aura of the scene, with the dramatic silhouette of the mill seen against the stormy sky, captured their imagination. Many stories and myths circulated about the painting, among them that this was a picture of Rembrandt's father's mill. The dark, threatening sky seemed to others to portend the severe financial difficulties that Rembrandt had in the mid-1650s.