Landscape with Windmill and Church

This early landscape by Theo van Doesburg, painted in 1900 when he was seventeen, predates by nearly two decades the geometric abstraction for which he became famous as a founder of De Stijl. The Centraal Museum's painting shows a conventional Dutch scene — a windmill and church amid flat agricultural land — handled in an academic-impressionist manner that reveals how far van Doesburg would travel from his beginnings.

The composition follows traditional Dutch landscape conventions: low horizon, prominent sky, and the vertical accent of a windmill balanced by a church tower. The handling is careful and somewhat tentative, with graduated tones and modest brushwork that show no hint of his later radical geometry.