Farm near Duivendrecht

Though Piet Mondrian is best known for his nonrepresentational paintings, his basic vision was rooted in landscape. He was particularly inspired by the flat topography of his native Holland, a subject he returned to even after he had begun working in an abstract style after attending an exhibition of the Cubist paintings of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in 1911. Mondrian first sketched this farm around 1905. Nine of the twenty known related paintings and drawings of the farm, however, were created later, during World War I. Mondrian likely returned to the subject because his wartime patrons generally preferred his earlier naturalistic compositions to his recent experiments with Cubism.