The Mill

In 1923 a group of Mondrian's friends placed this large canvas in the care of the Stedelijk Museum, and the museum's credit line still names them simply as friends of the artist. By then Mondrian had been back in Paris for four years, painting only black lines and flat blocks of colour. The picture itself the museum dates to around 1917, when the First World War was holding him in the Netherlands and his first fully abstract compositions were taking shape. Its subject is a windmill, a motif he had painted again and again in the years after 1900 along the rivers around Amsterdam. The canvas is a metre high and nearly as wide.