Farm near Duivendrecht

Piet Mondrian · c. 1916

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

86.3 × 107.9 cm (34 × 42 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Modernism

Farm near Duivendrecht catches Mondrian at a pivotal moment — the flat Dutch polder landscape rendered with a quiet intensity that sits somewhere between tradition and the radical abstraction he was moving toward. By 1916, Mondrian had already spent several years in Paris absorbing Cubism, and when the outbreak of the First World War stranded him back in the Netherlands, he turned again to the familiar terrain of Amsterdam's outskirts. The result is a body of landscape work that feels transitional in the best sense: the farmhouses, water, and low horizon are all still recognisably there, but the forms are becoming more deliberate, the palette more stripped back, the whole surface quietly insisting on something beyond mere representation. The paint is applied with a considered touch that compresses depth and flattens the scene into almost interlocking planes. Mondrian returned to Duivendrecht repeatedly during this period, treating the same stretch of countryside as a kind of visual problem to be solved across multiple canvases — a habit that would eventually lead directly to his grid paintings of the 1920s. This hand-painted oil reproduction, executed on canvas, preserves the layered texture and tonal restraint of the original held at the Art Institute of Chicago, giving the work a physical presence that a print simply cannot match.