Piet Mondriaan and Portrait of Elisabeth Sophia Maria (Betsy) Cavalini

'Portrait of Elisabeth Sophia Maria (Betsy) Cavalini' (1901) by Piet Mondriaan; Private Collection

Dutch painter Piet Mondriaan (March 7, 1872 - February 1, 1944) was most famous for his geometric abstract art, paintings of white background with black vertical and horizontal lines and the three primary colours. He was one of the major contributors to the magazine and art movement 'De Stijl'. I'm not really fond of abstract art so I will post here one of his early paintings, 'Farmyard with Blue Gate'. His early work consisted largely of landscapes, in the style of the Dutch Impressionists of the Hague School. I would never have guessed this was a Mondriaan. It's quite pretty, isn't it?

EDIT 12.09.2025: Above is the original text of this post. I'm doing a major maintenance of this blog, because a lot of images are missing since the image links stopped working (I had used image links instead of downloading the images and uploading to my blog). The image of this post was also missing. The previous post title was Piet Mondriaan and the Farmyard with the Blue Gate and the accompanying image caption read 'Farmyard with Blue Gate' (c.1898) by Piet Mondriaan; Tate Gallery, London. For the life of me, I cannot find the painting online anymore. There are paintings of other farms and yards but not the one with the blue gate, around 1898. I stopped searching and had to look for another painting. Then I found a very nice portrait, 'Portret van Elisabeth Sophia Maria (Betsy) Cavalini', painted by Mondriaan in 1901 as a commissioned portrait for his friend, Cornelis Bergman, who gifted it to his wife, Elisabeth (Betsy) Bergman-Cavalini. So here you have it, a totally different painting than this post's original choice. And for me a better one because I like portraits more than landscapes.