Farm Cottage at Duivendrecht

Farm Cottage at Duivendrecht is a small landscape painted in 1905 by a young Dutch artist who was still a few years away from discovering the abstract grid he would later be remembered for. The painting shows a low farmhouse with a steeply pitched roof, seen from the side, set against a flat Dutch landscape and an overcast sky.

The painting is not yet abstract. But look closely at how the artist has flattened the picture plane. The walls of the house are a single red plane. The roof is a solid shape against a paler sky. The trees, the grass, the road, the windows have all been reduced to blocks of color with clean edges. There is no perspective in the traditional sense.

This is Mondrian working out the visual language that would, by 1917, become his mature style: pure horizontal and vertical lines, primary colors, white grounds. Farm Cottage at Duivendrecht is one of the last paintings in which a recognizable subject survives, but it is already a painting about structure.

The painting has hung in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag (the municipal museum of The Hague) since the museum acquired it. The Hague is where Mondrian grew up, and the museum holds the largest collection of his work in the world.