Windmill at the Gein

In 1905 Piet Mondrian was a Dutch landscape painter in his early 30s, and nothing about him yet hinted at the man who would later reduce painting to red, blue and yellow rectangles. He spent these years along the quiet waterways just south of Amsterdam, and the river Gein, lined with windmills, was one of his regular haunts. He painted this mill more than once, often at dusk, when the sails and the bank flatten into dark shapes against a still-bright sky and double themselves in the water below. The heavy, silted brushwork belongs to the Dutch tradition he grew up inside. He would not leave for Paris, or for abstraction, until 1911.