House in sunlight

By about 1905 a few Dutch painters had begun working in pure, unmixed colour, set down in small separate touches and placed next to its opposite so that each made the other look brighter. The method drew on French Neo-Impressionism and on the Fauves, and in the Netherlands it came to be called Luminism. Mondrian painted this canvas in that manner between 1909 and the first months of 1910. The subject is as plain as it gets, the front of a small house seen straight on, with its door, its windows and a few shrubs in the garden. Wall, roof, path and leaves are all built out of the same dabs of paint, so the house and its garden sit on the canvas with nearly equal weight. His monogram, a P and an M laid over each other, is in the lower right corner.