Landscape with willows on the Gein

Around 1903 Piet Mondrian was living in Amsterdam and regularly left the city to paint. A favourite destination was the Gein, a small river near the village of Abcoude, lined with willows and popular with many Dutch landscape painters. He often went there with his friend Simon Maris, a painter and the son of the Hague School landscapist Willem Maris. Maris made a portrait of Mondrian at work there, sitting on a bicycle standing still, his easel propped on the handlebars. This canvas is one of those river pictures, the willow trunks dark against a pale evening sky. It is signed Piet Mondriaan, the Dutch spelling he used before he moved to Paris. The Utrecht collectors Lambertus and Josephina van Baaren bought it in 1957, and it has been at the Centraal Museum since 1980, on loan from their foundation.