Mill in Sunlight

When Piet Mondrian painted Mill; Mill in Sunlight (1908), he was 36 years old and a well-known landscape artist. But he didn’t want to become too absorbed by what was in vogue, such as the realist landscapes of the Hague School or the visionary images of the Symbolists. He was eager to do something new.

In the early years of the twentieth century, many artists were fascinated by the work of Vincent van Gogh, with its vivid use of colour and loose brushwork. Mondrian was impressed too. At the dawn of a new era, the world no longer needed an art of subdued shades of brown, grey and green, but something sparkling and radiant. Mondrian wanted to use colour to capture a particular atmosphere or visual experience at a specific moment in time, rather than to express personal emotions or feelings.

In Mill; Mill in Sunlight, Mondrian painted the sensation of looking at an object against the glare of the sun. Although he took an existing windmill (the Winkle Mill near Abcoude) as his point of departure, the details of the edifice are obscured by the blinding sunlight. The different shades of yellow in the sky represent the shimmer of the sun, against which the eye is able to distinguish only broad outlines and rough shapes. The shadow of the mill is painted in various shades of red and blue.

In 1909, Mondrian exhibited the painting at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The reviews were far from enthusiastic. ‘[…] a red, blue and yellow windmill passes my understanding.’ ‘A windmill drenched in blood […] against a yellow sky full of holes like a Swiss cheese.’ The famous Dutch psychiatrist and author Frederik van Eeden described Mondrian’s art as decadent and symptomatic of mental illness. Only one critic was positive. Israël Querido wrote: ‘Another canvas hangs there before you, depicting a mill in sunlight. You’ve never seen anything of such searing colour. – It is a boiling mass of flame. […] Once again, Mondrian has sought to paint, not the mill as a beautiful mill, not the colour, the sky, the light, the trees or the atmosphere, as beautiful trees, a beautifully coloured sky, but the momentary sensation of the glaring midday sun. […]’