Willow trees on the Gein

Willow Trees on the Gein (1903), at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, records Mondrian's sustained engagement with the River Gein's characteristic polder landscape. The Gein, flowing through the landscape southeast of Amsterdam, was lined with the pollarded willows that became one of the most distinctive motifs of his early work. This particular canvas, now in Haarlem, represents the naturalistic phase of the willow-on-water subject before Mondrian began the progressive formal reduction that would eventually bring him to near-abstract horizontal compositions. The work shows the Dutch polder landscape at its most characteristically flat and horizontal.

The willows on the Gein establish a compositional rhythm of vertical tree forms rising from the flat polder landscape. Mondrian records the characteristic form of pollarded willows—their dense, rounded crowns atop relatively slim trunks—reflected in the still ditch water below.