Field with Young Trees in the Foreground
Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944)
c. 1907
- Medium
- oil on paper laid on board
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 82.5 x 97 x 5.8 cm (32 1/2 x 38 3/16 x 2 5/16 in.); Unframed: 65.7 x 72 cm (25 7/8 x 28 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- Netherlands
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Gift of Frank Stella
- 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 Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
This painting depicts a field around the hamlet of Oele in the eastern Netherlands, where Mondrian lived during the summer of 1907. The evocative mood created by the trees silhouetted against a twilight sky suggests that Mondrian’s search for spirituality was present before he began painting completely abstract or non-objective compositions in 1916. Guided by readings in metaphysics and philosophy, Mondrian sought to achieve a higher spiritual reality in his paintings, which eventually led him to eliminate all representational elements in favor of a style of pure geometric abstraction.
