Still Life with Sunflower

Late in life, living in New York, Mondrian wrote that he had enjoyed painting flowers one at a time, a single bloom rather than a bouquet, so he could bring out its structure. This board from 1907 is one of them. A sunflower stands in a clear glass vase with its face turned toward us, a round white jar sits beside it, and a few broad leaves spread out behind. Everything else is dull green and ochre, brushed in quickly. He was living in Amsterdam then, still working in the muted colours of Dutch landscape painting. The following year he came back to the sunflower and painted it drooping and dying. This one passed through collections and galleries in the Netherlands, Switzerland, England and Michigan before Margaret Demant, a collector in Royal Oak, Michigan, gave it to the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1991.