[1] It was completed early in his career, in 1904, when "the artist abruptly broke from his former life and went into rural seclusion in Brabant, a province in southern Netherlands.

"[2] He painted numerous canvases on a rural theme: "in his initial public appearances as a professional artist Mondrian was more concerned with supplying a product that would sell than defining his own personal style.

"[3] Such paintings were before he developed the now more familiar abstract visual approach of the De Stijl movement.

Nevertheless, the painting still shows the beginning of Mondrian's evolution: during this period "he produced paintings of traditional subject matter—Dutch farmhouses and windmills and rivers and forests—but rendered these themes in a very untraditional way ... [he] composed his representations, rather, out of bold abstract planes and broad brushstrokes of saturated colour.

"[2] Despite the existence of a signature at the bottom left of the canvas, it was only attributed to Mondrian in 2004, by the art historian Joop Joosten.