Amsterdam—View from the Window

During a trip through the Netherlands in 1904, Kandinsky painted this view of Amsterdam without going down into the street. He worked from an upper window of the American Hotel on the Leidseplein, a new building in the Dutch Art Nouveau manner finished only a few years earlier. Below him lay the bridge over the Singelgracht, the outermost of the city's ring canals, and beyond it the trees of the Vondelpark and the Park Hotel. The people on the square are reduced to single touches of colour, a dark upright stroke for a figure, a dot of yellow, pink or white for a hat or a parasol. The paint stands up in thick ridges across the whole of the small board. The picture is part of the Guggenheim's founding collection in New York.