Zeeland farmer

By 1909 the seaside village of Domburg, on the Zeeland island of Walcheren, filled up every summer with painters gathered around Jan Toorop. Toorop had recently become a Catholic, and he painted the local farmers as people of simple faith, with titles like Trust in God. Mondrian's farmer, painted at the same moment, looks straight out with a face laid in red and a jacket and background in blue, local colour exchanged for pure, strong colour in the style Dutch critics called luminism. A Zeeuwsche boer was among the Domburg pictures Mondrian showed at the St Lucas exhibition in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum in 1910, and N. H. Wolf, editor of the weekly De Kunst, saw in it the dullness, the oafishness and the animal coarseness of every Zeeland farmer. The canvas reached The Hague in 1971 with the bequest of Salomon Slijper, a collector who bought Mondrian's early work in depth.