草を食む子牛

For most of its life this was not a Mondrian. The signature in the lower left corner had been doctored, the P turned into an F, so that it read as the work of Frits Mondriaan, the painter's uncle, whose landscapes sold better at the time than his nephew's did. The attribution was only put right when the picture came up at Christie's in Amsterdam on 6 September 2006.

Piet Mondriaan painted it in the first years of the century, a ditch, a row of pollarded willows and four calves in the grass, and showed it in Amsterdam in 1903 under the title it still carries. He went on painting Dutch fields and farm buildings for another decade before the horizons thinned out into the grids he is known for. Under the meadow, invisible now, lies an earlier still life of apples, a bowl and some books.