Irrigation ditch with two willows

Irrigation ditches—the sloten that thread through the Dutch polder landscape—were among the most characteristic features of the Netherlands' managed water landscape. Mondrian's painting of an irrigation ditch with two willows, at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, engages one of the most distinctively Dutch of all landscape subjects: the flat, watery polderland with its willows leaning over reflective ditches. The subject anticipates the Gein river compositions that would become central to his early mature work, the willows—pollarded, their crowns regularly cut back—constituting a quintessential feature of the Dutch lowland landscape Mondrian would return to obsessively.

The irrigation ditch provides a strong horizontal line and a reflective surface that doubles the sky and trees above. The two willows frame the composition vertically, their characteristic forms—cropped crowns, leaning trunks—rendered with the observational directness of Mondrian's early landscape studies.