Watercourse, field with cows and sky with cloud

Piet Mondrian's early landscapes of the Dutch polder countryside are among the most revealing works in his career, showing the representational foundation from which he would eventually arrive at pure geometric abstraction. This 1903 painting of a watercourse with cows and clouded sky is a straightforward Dutch naturalist subject, drawing on the long tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape, but already showing Mondrian's sensitivity to the horizontal dominance of the flat Dutch terrain. The work is held at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, which holds one of the largest collections of early Mondrian and makes the transformation of his vision from pastoral to abstraction comprehensible.

The composition is strongly horizontal, dominated by the flat water surface and expansive sky. Brushwork shows Post-Impressionist influence in its visible, directed marks. The palette is naturalistic — greens, browns, greys — but already shows Mondrian's sensitivity to tonal balance and structural clarity.