Brabant Farmyard

The AMAM is especially fortunate to have in its collection a number of works by artists made early in their careers. One outstanding example is Piet Mondrian's Brabant Farmyard, created during the time when the artist was influenced by the naturalism of the nineteenth-century Dutch painters of the Hague School. Mondrian spent the year of 1904 in the village of Uden, Brabant (southern Holland), where this work was likely painted.

Farmhouses in the Brabant were distinctive for their sloping thatched roofs and barn doors on their lateral sides. Here, the artist depicts three cows and a farmwoman in front of the doors to the stable and barn; the chimney toward the right divides the stable from family living quarters. The roof of the barn appears to be finished in its lower third with tiles, as indicated by the small planes of colors and short strokes seen there.

Although quite different from Mondrian's later, iconic abstract works made up of rectangular fields formed by black, white, red, yellow, and blue, this painting nevertheless conveys a sense of balance, order, and harmony in its largely frontal depiction of the barn, and its flat planes of muted color. In 1942, Mondrian wrote about such works:

I preferred to paint landscape and houses seen in grey, dark weather or in very strong sunlight, when the density of atmosphere obscures the details and accentuates the large outlines of objects. I often sketched by moonlight- cows resting or standing immovable on flat Dutch meadows, or houses with dead, blank windows. I never painted these things romantically; but from the very beginning, I was always a realist.

The AMAM's collection includes a small group of works created by Hague School artists, including Mother and Son, Twilight by Jozef Israëls, The Bridge by Jacob Maris, an untitled landscape by Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch, and Snow Storm by Anton Mauve.