Farm Setting, Three Tall Trees - Piet Mondrian (c. 1900s)

Piet Mondrian

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

This work depicts a rural Dutch farm scene dominated by three tall, slender trees rising prominently in the foreground — a subject entirely characteristic of Mondrian's early career, when he devoted himself to the landscape traditions of his native Netherlands. Executed in a naturalistic manner rooted in the Dutch Impressionist Hague School, the composition reflects his sustained interest in the vertical rhythms and structural forms found in trees, farmhouses, and the open countryside. Mondrian (1872–1944) produced numerous drawings and paintings of farms, trees, and rural settings in the years around 1900–1910, working in pencil, charcoal, and other media as he sketched the Dutch countryside around Amsterdam. Though today remembered for his austere geometric abstractions, these early landscape works reveal an artist deeply engaged with observation, form, and the underlying structure of nature.