Farmhouse with Haystack

Mondrian painted this farmhouse and haystack in 1898, when he was 26 and no one had reason to remember his name. This is fully two decades before the work everyone knows, the white canvases ruled into black lines and blocked with red, yellow, and blue. Here he is a young Dutch painter working in the sober, earthy naturalism of the Hague School he trained under, out in the flat country around the little river Gein, near Amsterdam, where he painted for years. The road to abstraction was slow. It opened around 1908 as he took up theosophy and its search for an order behind appearances, and it quickened when he saw Cubism in Paris a few years later. What is on this canvas is the Dutch landscape as he found it, set down plainly, before any of that came.