Stammer mill with summer house

In the early hours of 9 January 2012 this painting left the building. The gallery's alarm had gone off again and again that night until the guard stopped trusting it, and the break-in itself, through a balcony door, took about seven minutes. They took a Picasso, a pen and ink drawing by the 16th-century Italian painter Guglielmo Caccia, and this small Mondrian. A second Mondrian was carried out as well and dropped during the escape.

It came back in June 2021, out of thick brush in a gorge near Keratea, about 45 kilometres southeast of Athens. The man who confessed was a 49-year-old builder who described himself as an art enthusiast, said he had never tried to sell any of it, and called the theft the biggest mistake of his life. The Caccia drawing has not returned.

What hangs here again is Mondrian in 1905, years before the grids that made his name. The mill is the Stammermolen at Diemen, just east of Amsterdam, one of several Dutch mills he worked at around then, and the gallery's record notes an unusual support for it: oil on paper, laid down on wood.