Haystacks III

Around 1908 Mondrian was still a Dutch landscape painter, years before his grids of red, yellow and blue. Haystacks were a subject Claude Monet had made famous in a series of 1890 and 1891, and Mondrian painted his own small group of them, this canvas being the third. He did not keep to the colour of hay. The stacks are built from long upright strokes of red, violet and green under a streaky blue and white sky, above a field laid in with horizontal bands. It went early to a Dutch collector, Dr Gustaaf Adolf Ootmar, who owned it from 1910. His heirs took it to Kelowna, in British Columbia, and in 1957 it was sold to the New York dealer Sidney Janis. After several more dealers and sales, it was bought by the Musée d'Orsay in 2018.