Farm in Duivendrecht at evening

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Mondrian was caught on a visit to the Netherlands and could not get back to Paris, where his painting had been turning fast toward abstraction. Stuck at home, and with the Dutch collectors who kept him afloat preferring his older manner, he went back to a subject he had first drawn around 1906, the farm at Duivendrecht just outside Amsterdam. He painted and drew it perhaps 20 times over his life. Here it stands in the evening, the house and bare trees mirrored in the water, the light low and warm. It is a backward glance, made while the pure geometry he is now famous for waited on the other side of the border.