Still Life with Apples, a Pot with Flowers and a Metal Pan Piet Mondrian Buy Art Prints Now
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by
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 14, 2023
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Here we find a delightful, relatively detailed still life painting by Piet Mondrian. It dates from the year 1900 and the artist produced a number of works within this genre in that same year. It has moved between different private collections in the Netherlands since being purchased just after its completion.

The title for this piece may not be imaginative, but it is entirely helpful. Still Life with Apples, a Pot with Flowers and a Metal Pan delivers a variety of objects which have been carefully arranged together to produce a classical artwork. Mondrian had been practicing how he captured flowers at this time and was clearly focusing on his technical work. The overall piece feels fairly traditional which was not the usual way in which this artist worked but he was exploring the different options open to him at this time. It may have been that he could sell items of this more easily than his contemporary work and that concern is something faced by most artists as they develop their careers. Here he combines organic and manmade items to challenge himself a little more, with lighting impacting each item in a different way.

This painting is 94cm in height and 68cm in width. A cloth is used to produce a suitable setting for this painting, with items that carefully placed by Mondrian. The metal pan or plate sits at the back, reflecting light on to the neighbouring fruit and the vase. Several flowers hang loosely from the vase, but have not been arranged particularly carefully. In front are six apples of different colours. Some flowers have also fallen out of the vase and lie to the side. The cloth continues across the back of the painting and appears to have some embroidered detail. The angle at which it hangs suggests that perhaps the artist used a chair or other piece of furniture on which to place all of these items. He created other still life pieces, but they would not be as complex and detailed as Still Life with Apples, a Pot with Flowers and a Metal Pan.

Mondrian would sign this painting in the bottom left corner and it would later appear within a catalogue raisonne which brought together his entire list of artworks. It is listed as having resided within private collections throughout its own lifetime, though not much more information can be found than that. It would today hold a considerable value were it to come up for auction simply because of its level of completeness and also its firm attribution to Mondrian. Whilst it may not be as valuable as his abstract artworks, which are far more famous, it would still be worth plenty, though it does not appear that its owners would be interested in parting with it anytime soon.