Windmühle in Holland

Nobody would guess this was painted by the man who, a few years later, would make some of the first abstract pictures in Europe. In 1904 Kandinsky still painted things you can name. He was nearly 40, had left a law career in Moscow to study art in Munich, and was spending these years travelling, with a stop in the Netherlands that gave him this windmill. He set it down in tempera, the fast-drying paint of old panel pictures, in flat, bright patches of colour. His first fully abstract works were still about six years away.