MURA · THE COLLECTION · PIET MONDRIAN

Amsterdam from the West

Amsterdam Skyline Viewed from the West is an early watercolour by Piet Mondrian, dated by the Art Institute of Chicago to about 1899. Bare trees and small boats are reflected in still water in front of the city. In watercolour, gouache and black chalk, it measures 39.9 by 58.8 cm and came to the museum in 2013.

Piet Mondrian · c. 1899 · Watercolor, gouache, and fabricated black chalk, with erasures, on cream wove paper · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The museum describes the skyline of Amsterdam seen from the west, as it often appears in Mondrian's pictures of the time. The scene is full of lifelike detail, but the museum suggests that what delighted him was the rhythmic placement of the trees: they reach to the top edge of the sheet, and their reflections stretch across the water, punctuated by coppiced stumps. The catalogue entry describes bare trees and small boats reflected in still water beneath a pale city sky.

How it was painted

Mondrian was born in Amersfoort in 1872 and grew up in Winterswijk, where his father was a head teacher and qualified drawing teacher; with his uncle Frits, a pupil of the Hague School painter Willem Maris, he painted and drew along the river Gein. In 1892 he entered the Academy for Fine Art in Amsterdam. Most of his work from these years is naturalistic or Impressionistic landscape, initially in the Hague School manner, as he searched for a personal style. The museum admits it is hard to date this sheet precisely: even after he turned to abstraction he still made more saleable scenes to support himself, but its similarity to his late nineteenth-century work suggests it predates 1900. Mondrian died in New York in 1944.

Where it went

The watercolour was sold at Sotheby's in London in November 1967 as Canal in Holland to Basil Appleby, who lent it to Piet Mondrian and The Hague School of Landscape Painting in Regina and Edmonton in 1969, where it was catalogued as Farmer Carting Manure. It was sold under that title at Christie's in Amsterdam in May 1990 and again, from a charitable foundation, at Christie's in London in December 1992, when Dorothy Braude Edinburg of Brookline, Massachusetts, bought it. She gave it to the Art Institute in 2013 for the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection, after showing it there in Drawings in Dialogue in 2006. Robert Welsh lists it as A207 in his catalogue of Mondrian's naturalistic works. The museum lists no current gallery for it.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to Mura's Modern Colour collection with a quiet mood: trees, boats and a city mirrored in still water.