Piet Mondrian – Farm near Duivendrecht, c. 1916 | Giclée Print

A low farmhouse behind bare trees, and the whole of it again upside down in the water. The sky is doing something Mondrian rarely allowed himself later: pink, apricot, a wash of green along the bank. Nothing here announces the man who would spend the 1920s painting three colours and a grid.

He went backwards on purpose. Mondrian first drew this farm at Duivendrecht, south-east of Amsterdam, around 1905. He came back to it for years — about twenty works are known — and nine of them were made during the First World War, a decade after the first sketches, at exactly the moment he was pushing hardest into Cubism in his other work. The reason is unromantic and worth knowing: stranded in the Netherlands by the war, he had patrons who liked the naturalistic pictures and would not buy the experiments. So he painted the farm again. The Art Institute's canvas is one of those late returns, dated about 1916.

What that makes it is a picture with two clocks running in it. The subject is 1905; the handling is 1916. The trees have become a flat lattice against the sky, the reflection is a second composition rather than an echo, and the whole is built out of colour laid in planes — a Cubist's way of seeing, spent on a farmhouse.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the Art Institute of Chicago's own open-access photograph of the canvas. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 86.3 × 107.9 cm, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — reduced, 0.39× original. Image 42.00 × 33.37 cm.
80 × 60 cm / 31.5 × 23.6 in — reduced, 0.59× original. Image 63.44 × 50.40 cm.

No crop. Mondrian painted to all four edges and the museum's photograph carries no studio ground at all — we measured ten bands along each side and found paint everywhere, never the flat light grey a photographer's backdrop leaves. So the file is printed whole. Nothing has been trimmed away and nothing has been added.

On the borders. On the small sheet the image takes the house width, 84 % of the sheet: 4.00 cm at each side, 3.08 above and 3.54 below. The large sheet is measured on the height instead — the painting is slightly squarer than the paper, so 84 % of the width would run off the top and bottom — which leaves 8.28 cm at the sides, 4.47 above and 5.13 below. Both sit at optical centre, 1:1.15, not in the middle.

Resolution. The museum's file is 12504 pixels across, which is 756 dpi at the small size and 501 dpi at the large one. Both sheets are printed at our flat 300 dpi, the most that matte fine art paper resolves; nothing is enlarged in software, and there is a great deal of headroom left over.

Provenance
Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944), Farm near Duivendrecht, c. 1916.
Oil on canvas, 86.3 × 107.9 cm.
Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Dolly J. van der Hoop Schoenberg, acc. no. 2001.479 (AIC object 144467).
Catalogue raisonné: Joosten and Welsh, vol. 2, no. C8. Older literature calls the picture Landscape with Farmhouse and dates it 1906.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph under CC0.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger — how the file, not the sheet, sets the ceiling.