Windmill on the Gein

By 1907 Piet Mondrian had painted the windmills and flat water meadows along the little river Gein, southeast of Amsterdam, many times over. He was in his mid-30s and still very much a Dutch landscape painter, working outdoors in the naturalist tradition he had trained in. Nothing here forecasts the man most people picture: the black grids and blocks of red, blue and yellow were still years away, and would only come after he moved to Paris and met Cubism around 1912. What this canvas is chasing is dusk, the heavy silhouette of the mill against a sky worked in low, warm tones, with the reflection breaking up in the water below. He painted this same stretch of the Gein in several versions across these years, each one pushing the shapes a little flatter than the one before.