Farm near Duivendrecht

For decades this canvas carried the wrong date. Books from the late 1950s and a 1968 exhibition in Pasadena on serial imagery presented it as a work of 1906, from the years when Mondrian was painting Dutch rivers and farms at dusk. In the early 1980s the American art historian Barbara Buenger published it as a later version, made between 1914 and 1916. The farm at Duivendrecht, a village just outside Amsterdam, was a motif he had first sketched around 1905, and of about 20 known paintings and drawings of it, nine belong to the war years. This canvas left his hands around 1916 for the Amsterdam collection of Eduard and Lea van der Hoop. It stayed in their family until a descendant, Dolly van der Hoop Schoenberg, gave it to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001.