Amsterdam Skyline Viewed from the West
Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944)
c. 1899
- Medium
- Watercolor, gouache, and fabricated black chalk, with erasures, on cream wove paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 39.9 × 58.8 cm (15 3/4 × 23 3/16 in.)
- Culture
- Netherlands
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Dorothy Braude Edinburg to the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
It is difficult to know precisely when Mondrian made this lyrical landscape. Even after he began to create his better-known abstract work, he still made more salable scenes in order to support himself. Since it bears stylistic similarities to his late-19th-century work, the watercolor probably predates 1900. The Amsterdam skyline appears from the west, as it does often in his pictures from that time. Although the scene is filled with lifelike details, Mondrian seemed to have delighted in the rhythmic placement of the trees. As they reach to the upper edge of the sheet, their reflections extend across the water, punctuated intermittently by coppiced stumps.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
