Farmstead on the Gein screened by tall trees: ultramarine sky with yellow ray of sunset

In 1907 Piet Mondrian was 35 and still years away from the straight lines that made him famous. He kept coming back to the Gein, a slow river south-east of Amsterdam, usually at dusk, painting the same farms and trees as the light went. Here a farmhouse sits half-hidden behind a screen of tall trees, their dark shapes doubled in the still water below. The sky is a deep ultramarine, cut by a single warm band where the sun has set. It belongs to a run of evening and night scenes he made between 1905 and 1908, when he was already less interested in the farm itself than in how a few broad masses, the trees, their reflection, the sky, could hold a whole picture together. The one warm note in all that blue is the yellow ray of sunset that gives the painting its name.