Apple Trees in Blue with Wavy Lines I

This Mondrian painting is dated at around 1908 and offers an early example of how the artist was developing towards expressionism and abstraction.

There was not much detail delivered in this piece and it is amongst the smallest painting to have come from his career. Much of the forms are created from thick, single strokes of the brush and even the trees themselves are left without any major clarity. All that said, it is still a particularly interesting piece which shows both the way in which Mondrian was changing his style in this early period but also is another addition to his sizeable number of paintings of trees, which he tackled in a number of different ways. One can compare this work with Gray Tree, for example, to see the fast changes found in his career in just a few years.

Considering the very small nature of this painting, it may have been just a very quick work in which the artist experiments with a few ideas. We find a bright blue sky, which likely would have been put in first, before the branches of the trees plus the trunk are added over the top. There are some circular motions of white oil below, which is most likely to have been some plants or low flying clouds. The foreground is dominated by strokes of green grass, with some sandy colour showing through, perhaps directly from the material below.

The original piece can be found at the Zeeuws Museum in Middleburg, Netherlands. This region is close to the Belgian border and holds an impressive selection of work which aims to teach us about the history of the Dutch people through a variety of historic items, going well beyond the Dutch art that they have. Mondrian is one of the few modern artists found in the collection, with most coming from centuries previous.