Stammer Mill with Streaked Sky

Long before Piet Mondrian became the man of white canvases gridded in red, yellow, and blue, he was a Dutch landscape painter, and around 1906 he was painting windmills. He made more than 30 of them. This one, a dark mill by the water known as the Stammer mill, still belongs to that earlier world of cows, bridges, and wet Dutch light. But look at the sails. They cross in exact verticals and horizontals, and the sky behind them is laid down in three flat bands, mauve above and below and a streaked blue between. The bones of the abstraction he is famous for are already here, hiding inside a real mill on a real evening. Down at the foot of the mill, easy to miss, a woman and a black-and-white cow are crossing a low bridge over the water.