Still life: apples, pot with flowers and metal pan

Still Life: Apples, Pot with Flowers and Metal Pan (around 1900) is a multi-element still-life arrangement that places Mondrian within the Dutch domestic still-life tradition while showing his early engagement with the color and form relationships that would later preoccupy him in purely abstract terms. The combination of fruit (apples), flowers, and a metal pan—organic and reflective surfaces in close proximity—offered opportunities to study the contrasting surface qualities that traditional still-life painting exploited. This work belongs to the period when Mondrian was working across multiple subject categories before finding his distinctive formal direction.

The still life presents varied surface textures and colors in close proximity: the warm reds and greens of apples, the varied colors of flowers, and the reflective metallic surface of the pan. Mondrian organizes these elements through tonal contrast and careful attention to the different ways each surface receives and reflects light.