Landschap met hooikar, kerktorens en molen

Van Doesburg's Landschap met hooikar, kerktorens en molen — landscape with hay cart, church towers, and mill — is a more compositionally ambitious early work than his simpler 1901 landscape, deploying the characteristic elements of Dutch rural landscape painting (mill, church, agricultural transport) within a single panoramic view. As with the other early van Doesburg landscapes in the Cultural Heritage Agency collection, this work is most interesting for what it reveals about the conventional formation of a major modernist — the traditional subjects and handling that he would entirely reject in the founding of De Stijl.

The composition assembles the canonical elements of Dutch landscape tradition — windmill, church tower, hay cart — in a conventionally structured horizontal panorama. The handling shows van Doesburg working competently within the naturalist tradition he would later radically repudiate with his geometric abstraction.