Spring Sun (Lentezon): Castle Ruin: Brederode, c.1909-10 (oil on masonite)

A weblike network of tree branches reveals a distant glimpse of a deteriorating medieval castle. The free yet carefully nuanced quality of the brushwork exemplifies the artist’s early dedication to oil sketches made in nature and his interest in capturing the changing quality of light and atmosphere at different times of the day and year. Although Mondrian was still using a broken, almost pointillist touch at this point in his career, the fragmenting of the landscape forms in this work suggests a movement toward the cubist vocabulary that would dominate his work in the coming years.