Composition (Tree)

This tree is a mosaic, built up from small coloured pieces. The Stedelijk names Jacoba van Heemskerck as its designer and dates the design to 1920, and it does not record who laid the mosaic or when. In those years she was designing for the Berlin workshops of Puhl & Wagner, a firm famous for glass mosaics that had merged in 1914 with the stained-glass studio of Gottfried Heinersdorff. One of her designs for them, from 1919, has a red tree at its centre, and trees run through her abstract paintings of the 1910s as well. The mosaic is just over a metre high and came to the museum as a gift from J. W. E. Buijs of The Hague.