Portrait of a Girl with Flowers

Portrait of a Girl with Flowers from around 1900, now at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, represents Mondrian's engagement with traditional portrait painting enriched by the inclusion of flowers—a combination with deep roots in Dutch golden-age portraiture where the two traditions frequently intertwined. The flowers introduce color and life to the composition while evoking the still-life tradition that ran parallel to Dutch portraiture for centuries. Mondrian painted relatively few figure portraits, making this work a somewhat unusual example in his output before his eventual turn toward the formal concerns that would characterize his mature art.

The portrait combines formal conventions of figure painting—direct gaze, careful facial modeling—with the decorative and coloristic interest of the flower arrangement. Mondrian's handling of the flowers shows a sensitivity to color and texture that would later, transformed, feed his interest in pure chromatic relationships.