Five Tree Silhouettes along the Gein with Moon

One cannot help but remember the stunning Schiele painting of 1917, named Four Trees, when viewing this equally memorable work from Piet Mondrian of around a decade earlier.

The Gein is a long river within the Netherlands and Mondrian captures a scene alongside it here, carefully painting five trees that are relatively equally distanced. The sun rise allows an expressive colour scheme and style, where detail can justifiably be limited because of the reduction in light at this point in the day. It is a beautifully simple artwork with trees displayed above their reflections and the bright sun found centrally, but small. Most of the elements to this painting are particularly dark and the trees themselves are left as silhouettes, and therefore just a suggestion of shape.

There were many landscape scenes during this part of Mondrian's career - he was inspired by nature and also found a calming atmosphere to his outdoor scenes. This was a long way from the abstract squares and lines that would make him truly famous, and it underlines just quite how versatile this artist was. Only those who really look into his career deeply will have come across artworks such as this, but it would be wrong to dismiss his tree paintings just because they do not rank as his best known. It is the nature of art that the media will categorise the famous names within a movement or style, even though their career may be filled with all manner of successful ventures down different artistic avenues.

Five Tree Silhouettes along the Gein with Moon can be found in the collection of the Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag, Netherlands, alongside a number of other paintings from Mondrian's career. This respected institution continue to promote Dutch art from the past few centuries and have attempted to illustrate the rich artistic history of this nation, going beyond just the more famous periods such as the Dutch Golden Age.