Brabant Farmyard

In 1904 the painter who would later reduce the world to black lines and blocks of red, yellow and blue was living in a village in the Dutch province of Brabant, painting cows and farmyards. Mondrian was 32. He had taken cheap lodgings in the town of Uden early that year and, by his own account, did little but paint until he left the following winter. What he made there belongs to an older Dutch tradition, the muted tones and soft handling of the Hague School painters he admired. A farmyard, low buildings, and a quiet order in the way it all sits on the canvas. In the lower corner he signed it 'Piet Mondriaan', with the double a he would drop a few years later in Paris, when he became the other Mondrian.