Landscape with three reclining cows

Landscape with three reclining cows of 1904 belongs to Mondrian's final years of sustained engagement with conventional Dutch landscape subjects before his encounter with Theosophy and with Cézanne's work would redirect his art entirely. The three reclining cows — a pose suggesting afternoon contentment and rural ease — were a stock subject of Dutch pastoral tradition from the seventeenth century onward. Mondrian treats them with genuine observational care while moving the composition toward greater simplicity and spatial clarity than his earlier animal paintings. The flat polder ground and expansive sky leave the three forms almost monumental in their isolated presence.

The three recumbent forms are placed with studied composition — none overlapping, each clearly readable against the flat ground. Paint is handled more confidently than in his earliest work, the bodies modelled with assured strokes that suggest form without belaboring detail. The palette is limited: earth tones below, grey-white sky above.