Paesaggio con alberi

Salomon Slijper was a Dutch diamond dealer who bought Mondrian by the armful, and what he wanted was the work most visitors now walk past, the dunes and the windmills and the trees. He had little patience for the abstractions and said so, and went on buying anyway. This canvas is from 1912, the year Mondrian moved to Paris, when the trees in his pictures were flattening into overlapping planes and the branches had started to behave like scaffolding. Slijper spent the occupation in hiding, helped by his housekeeper, and his Mondrians sat out the war in a neighbour's attic. When he died in 1971 he left about 180 paintings and drawings to the museum in The Hague, which is how that collection became the largest of its kind anywhere. This canvas, 120 centimetres tall, came in with the bequest.