Field with Young Trees in the Foreground (c. 1907): Art, History and Details

Field with Young Trees in the Foreground (c. 1907) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: Field with Young Trees in the Foreground
• Date: c. 1907
• Creator attribution: Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944)
• Culture: Netherlands
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on paper laid on board
• 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.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1971.220

A detail from the museum

Mondrian was a prolific writer drawn to spiritual studies and he believed that art and philosophy were deeply interconnected.

Collection credit

Gift of Frank Stella

Further reading listed by the museum

• Neet, Jane. “Mondrian’s ‘Chrysanthemum.’” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74, no. 7 (September 1987): 282–303. Published as: Bos Oele

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.