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Lot Essay
Postmolen in Veghel was executed by Mondrian during his year-long sojourn in the Dutch province of North Brabant in 1904. The stark, rural simplicity of the province made a deep impression on the artist during a short trip taken the previous year to visit his friend Albert van den Briel. He resolved to return and settled in the town of Uden. Van den Briel remembered Mondrian's extended stay as being vital in terms of the artist's personal growth, stating: "This period had a great influence on Piet. It was here, at Uden, that the real Mondrian was born" (quoted in M. Seuphor, Piet Mondrian, Life and Work, New York, 1956, p. 54). Mondrian focused on a few select subjects during his visit, including simple farmyard scenes, studies of cattle, and the steep-roofed farmhouses characteristic of the region. Of the twenty-seven works—paintings and drawings—completed while in Brabant, only four are dedicated to the representation of windmills, a subject that Mondrian would later adopt as an important motif in his experimentation with new pictorial means.
For this highly refined study, Mondrian has chosen to portray a traditional post mill situated in Veghel, a village located several kilometers southeast of Uden, identified by the gothic spire of the church of St. Lambertus in the background. The pastoral subject and earthy palette reflect Mondrian's early connection to The Hague School of painters, who combined the precepts of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape art with the direct execution and atmospheric effects of late nineteenth-century French painting. Yet, it was during this period of working in relative isolation from his peers that Mondrian began to bring out the formal qualities of his subjects, rather than their anecdotal or picturesque possibilities. Whilst the present composition retains a clear sensitivity to architectural detail and the atmosphere of the surrounding landscape, the flattening effect of the white clouds and the powerful vertical and horizontal thrust of the closely cropped mill invests an otherwise romantic subject with a sense of rigor and order that appears as a natural precursor to Mondrian's later body of work.
For this highly refined study, Mondrian has chosen to portray a traditional post mill situated in Veghel, a village located several kilometers southeast of Uden, identified by the gothic spire of the church of St. Lambertus in the background. The pastoral subject and earthy palette reflect Mondrian's early connection to The Hague School of painters, who combined the precepts of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape art with the direct execution and atmospheric effects of late nineteenth-century French painting. Yet, it was during this period of working in relative isolation from his peers that Mondrian began to bring out the formal qualities of his subjects, rather than their anecdotal or picturesque possibilities. Whilst the present composition retains a clear sensitivity to architectural detail and the atmosphere of the surrounding landscape, the flattening effect of the white clouds and the powerful vertical and horizontal thrust of the closely cropped mill invests an otherwise romantic subject with a sense of rigor and order that appears as a natural precursor to Mondrian's later body of work.