Brown and white heifer

The man who painted this would, within about 15 years, reduce a picture to black lines and a few rectangles of red, yellow and blue. Nothing here points that way yet. In 1904 Piet Mondrian, then in his early thirties, had left Amsterdam for the countryside of Brabant in the southern Netherlands, where he painted much what any Dutch landscape painter of his generation painted: a heifer, brown and white, standing in a low, wet meadow. The Kunstmuseum in The Hague, which owns it, holds the largest Mondrian collection anywhere, and nearly all of it is the later abstraction. This canvas comes from before that turn. The muted greens and browns and the plain, direct brushwork belong to the Hague School, the naturalist tradition he had grown up inside.