PIET MONDRIAN
1872 Amersfoort – 1944 New York
THE WEAVERS’ HOUSE
pencil on paper, 112 x 166 mm.
signed lower right: PM and inscribed lower left: 17. Dec. Paris PM
date: 1899
provenance:
Mrs. Helga Schussheim-Assuschkevitch (1911- 1972) Amsterdam;
Mr. Joop P. Smid, Amsterdam;
thence by descent.
exhibited:
Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Mondrian: Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, New Yorker Bilder, December 6th 1980 – February 15th 1981, no. 3;
Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Mondrian: Drawings and Watercolors, July 11th – September 20th 1981, no. 5.
literature:
Herbert Henkels, Mondriaan in Winterswijk. Een essay over de jeugd van Mondrian, z’n vader en z’n oom, The Hague, 1979, p. 47;
Wim Scholtz, “Tweemaal Mondriaan en het Mondriaanhuis,” Jaarboek Achterhoek en Liemers 9, 1986, pp. 108-9;
Exh. Cat. Piet Mondrian 1872-1944, Haags Gemeentemuseum The Hague, National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1995-96, p. 91
Joop P. Joosten and Robert P. Welsh, Piet Mondrian, Catalogue Raisonné; Catalogue Raisonné of the Naturalistic Works (until early 1911), vol. I, New York, 1998, no. A71.
This drawing demonstrates a high level of technical and artistic refinement. Piet Mondrian, son of a drawing teacher, drew a part of the Weavers’ House and its surrounding natural environment with exceptional precision in his sketchbook. Subtle tonal gradations generate a nuanced light effect that contributes to the overall visual coherence and compositional unity of the work.
At the age of twenty-seven, Mondrian had completed his academic training and was earning his living in Amsterdam as an independent artist, primarily through portrait commissions and by copying Old Masters in museums. In the autumn of 1898, he left the capital and returned to his parental home in Winterswijk in the eastern part of the Netherlands to recover from pneumonia, remaining there until the summer of 1899.
During his stay with his parents, Mondrian worked extensively in the surrounding area, and his art underwent a notable stylistic development. He began to distance himself from the muted landscape tradition of the Hague School and increasingly focused on structural elements within the composition. Undifferentiated areas of greenery gave way to clearly articulated tree trunks and branches, introducing a sense of rhythm into the image, while walls, doors, and beams served to reinforce its compositional framework. Contours became more pronounced, and the framing of the image appears less incidental, with motifs parallel to the picture plane and by carefully calibrated relationships to the edges of the composition. Art historians have frequently interpreted these characteristics as prefiguring Mondrian’s later abstract work—a reading that Mondrian himself would later endorse.
The Weavers’ House was located directly opposite Mondrian’s parental home. The building, formerly used for textile production, provided accommodation for several weavers and their families. Mondrian explored the same motif in watercolor (fig. 1), employing a palette of blue, red, and white—colors that would become emblematic of his mature work. It was characteristic of the artist to revisit a composition multiple times, introducing subtle variations in his ongoing search for equilibrium. The present sketchbook drawing presents a more dynamic effect, as its cropping is more radical than that of the watercolor.
Fig. 1 Piet Mondrian, Weavers’ House, 1899, mixed media on paper, 771 x 543 mm, private collection.
Fig. 2 Piet Mondrian, Self-Potrait, c. 1900, oil on canvas, 51 x 40 cm, The Phillips Collection, Washington, inv.no. 1375
Only a few years later, Mondrian would emerge as one of the most significant innovators of twentieth-century art. His early figurative work formed an essential foundation that, through his engagement with Cubism, ultimately led to the development of his distinctive form of geometric abstraction. Only after an extended period of close study of nature did Mondrian, from around 1908 onward, become increasingly influenced by Theosophy and progressively more concerned with the underlying order of visible reality.
The drawing is inscribed “17 Dec Paris” at the lower left, indicating a later moment in its history rather than the time of its original execution. It is generally assumed that Mondrian removed the sheet from his sketchbook during one of his periods of residence in Paris—either between 1912 and 1914 or during his extended stay from 1919 to 1938. Such an intervention would be consistent with the artist’s practice of revisiting earlier work and selectively extracting drawings for presentation, exchange, or sale. Once detached from the sketchbook, the drawing was likely gifted or sold by Mondrian, entering circulation as an independent work on paper.
Weavers’ House was owned by J. P. Smid, proprietor of Galerie Monet in Amsterdam. Within his generation, Smid was the most important Dutch dealer and collector of Piet Mondrian’s work. A number of the works he acquired are now held in major international museum collections.
Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was born in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, and trained at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In his early career, he worked primarily as a landscape painter, drawing inspiration from the Dutch countryside and riverine environments. These works, grounded in naturalistic observation, provided Mondrian with a framework for investigating compositional balance, rhythm, and the relationship between form and space. Around 1900, his practice began to shift as he sought to move beyond the depiction of appearances toward a more ordered and essential representation of reality. This search was further shaped by Symbolism and by his interest in spiritual philosophy, particularly Theosophy. He joined the Theosophical Society in 1909.
Mondrian’s move to Paris in 1911 marked a decisive turning point in his career. There, he encountered Cubism, which offered an analytical language through which to rethink his relationship to nature. By systematically reducing natural forms to linear and planar relationships, he developed an increasingly abstract visual vocabulary. This process culminated in Neo-Plasticism, his mature style of geometric abstraction based on vertical and horizontal lines and a restricted palette of primary colors. In his later years in the United States, Mondrian continued to refine this language in dialogue with modern urban life. He died in New York in 1944, having secured his position as a central figure in the history of twentieth-century modern art.