#trees

This came from a string of coastal landscapes painted while recovering from a breakdown — a much quieter stretch than the work he's known for.

Wikipedia has this down as the earliest painting of his that anyone knows about, done when he was seventeen, out by a stream near Le Havre. It's signed with the name Oscar — apparently that was the first half of his actual name, and he dropped it in his twenties.

The oval is the clue: pictures shaped like this were usually made to fit a panel over a door or a fireplace, ordered as part of the decorating rather than hung on a nail. From what I've read this one came with a companion piece the same size.

The story goes he bought this farm to stop the old olive trees being pulled up for a flower nursery, then spent his last years painting the place. By then his hands were badly arthritic — apparently brushes had to be wedged into them for him.

I couldn't turn up much on this exact one, but Mondrian returned to this same farm and its reflection again and again in these years, like something about it wouldn't let him go.

He apparently spent decades loudly declaring himself a genius to anyone who'd listen and got nowhere — until Duchamp, of all people, picked him out of an exhibition and started championing him.

Wikipedia puts him with a group of Munich painters who reckoned a picture could work the way music does — colour doing the carrying, the scene barely hanging on. Apparently this comes from the stretch of years when the nameable things were on their way out of his pictures for good. Not long after, there was nothing left in them to point at.

He apparently gave up a business career around 1890 to paint full-time and fell in with Gauguin's crowd in Brittany — though you'd never guess that from a quiet river scene like this one.

He seems to be painting almost nothing but trees his whole life, and kept at it into his nineties — someone supposedly called him 'the Michelangelo of trees', which is a lot of title for a man who mostly did quiet evenings like this.

Painted as a present for his brother's newborn son, who'd been given his name. They say the family hung it over their bed. The flat, bright look of it supposedly owes a lot to the Japanese prints he collected.