by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on September 29, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
About the painting
In Gray Tree, a leafless trunk rises through a web of branches that nearly fills the canvas. We can still recognize a tree, yet its boughs and the space behind them seem to share the same gray, fractured surface. Painted in 1911, the work sits at a decisive point in Piet Mondrian's move from observed landscape toward abstraction. The original belongs to Kunstmuseum Den Haag, which titles it The Grey Tree. Its spelling differs from this page's established title; both refer to the same painting.[1][2]
The painting is not simply a black-and-white preview of Mondrian's later grids. Its curved branches, slanting marks and still visible subject make it a different kind of experiment. The museum places it in the unsettled months before Mondrian moved to Paris in January 1912. In 1911 he had encountered discussion of Cubism and was reconsidering what a painting could do with line, colour and form. Here the tree remains a starting point, while the relationship among its parts becomes the subject of sustained attention.[1]
At a glance
- ArtistPiet Mondrian (Piet Mondriaan, 1872–1944)
- TitleGray Tree; The Grey Tree in the museum's English collection record
- Date1911
- MediumOil on canvas
- Dimensions79.7 × 109.1 cm (height × width)
- CollectionKunstmuseum Den Haag; bequest of Salomon B. Slijper
- Museum object number0334314
- Catalogue raisonnéJoosten B4; distinct from the B3 chalk study[1][2][3]
Where this painting sits in Mondrian's career
Contents
- What do you see in Gray Tree?
- Annotated details in Gray Tree
- Why did Mondrian use gray?
- Was Gray Tree painted in Paris?
- How does it relate to The Red Tree and Flowering Apple Tree?
- Is there a preparatory study?
- Where is the painting now, and why does it matter?
- Can the actual tree be identified?
What do you see in Gray Tree?
Start at the thick trunk near the lower centre. It divides into a succession of dark limbs that bend outward across almost the whole width of the picture. Smaller lines cross them, echo them and occasionally disappear into the background. The branching creates an oval sweep, but the shape is irregular. The upper limbs press toward the top edge, while lateral branches run almost into the left and right edges. There is little empty sky to set the tree apart.
 The Red Tree Piet Mondrian.jpg)
The palette is restricted without being flat. Pale and darker grays, blackish lines and touches of near-white move through both the tree and its surroundings. Broad, angular strokes behind the branches make the background active. In places a branch appears firm; elsewhere its edge seems to merge with adjacent marks. This is why the painting can feel both recognizable and hard to separate into a clear foreground and background. The eye follows a limb, loses it among similar tones, then finds another route across the canvas.
The overall shape matters as much as any individual branch. Mondrian lets curved and diagonal forms spread over a wide, horizontal canvas. A patch of light ground may interrupt a dark arc, while a darker patch in the background seems to continue its direction. These are observations a viewer can test in the reproduction. They do not depend on identifying the species of tree or turning each brushmark into a symbol.
The museum describes Mondrian reducing the tree to its essentials and giving colour and line a stronger role than literal subject matter. That does not mean that every mark is a geometric unit. The painting keeps the unevenness of a living tree. Its force comes from the tension between that familiar form and the increasingly independent structure made from marks on canvas.[1]
Annotated details in Gray Tree
Follow the trunk, branching arcs and shifting gray planes in five close views of the 1911 painting. Select a number to jump to a detail.
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Choose a number to reach its detail, then select a detail image to open the gallery. Open the full-resolution image.
Details from GRAY TREE
Five close views of the painting.
The trunk divides
The dark trunk rises from the lower centre, then divides into limbs that spread across the canvas. Its upright weight holds the branching structure together.
Branches sweep left
Thick arcs bend toward the left edge. Smaller marks cross and echo them, making the tree more intricate than a single silhouette.
The canopy reaches upward
At the top, the branching lines press against pale, angled strokes. Tree and background become hard to separate in places.
The right side keeps moving
Long dark limbs extend toward the right edge. The gray patches behind them carry some of the same directional energy.
Ground and painted marks meet
Near the lower edge, short pale strokes interrupt darker branches and ground. Mondrian's signature is visible at the left of the full image.
Why did Mondrian use gray?
Kunstmuseum Den Haag draws a sharp comparison with Evolution, which Mondrian also painted in 1911. The earlier painting's rich colour has given way here to variations of black, white and gray. The museum calls this a return to the basics of drawing. Colour has not vanished; subtle differences of tone help some branches move forward and others recede. But those differences do less to describe a particular hour, season or weather than the colours in many of Mondrian's earlier landscapes.[1]
The limited palette focuses attention on line and balance. A red tree against a blue ground announces the distinction between subject and setting immediately. In Gray Tree, trunk, boughs and surroundings occupy related tones. The viewer has to assemble the subject from the directions and weight of the marks. Gray is therefore an active decision, not merely the absence of colour.
It would be misleading to say that Mondrian had already arrived at the primary colours and straight black bars of his mature compositions. He would develop those methods over subsequent years. In 1911, curved, overlapping and sloping marks still dominate this canvas. The change visible here is a questioning of how much description a picture needs while remaining anchored to a subject.
Was Gray Tree painted in Paris?
No. The Kunstmuseum places the work in the period before Mondrian's move to Paris in January 1912. He had visited the French capital briefly in spring 1911, and the museum says Cubism was a subject of discussion there. Its account does not depend on his having studied a particular Picasso or Braque canvas on that visit. It also notes an autumn 1911 exhibition at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, which Mondrian helped organise, where work by the Cubists could be seen.[1]
The timing makes Gray Tree a transitional painting made in the Netherlands as Mondrian was preparing to leave. It records a response to new ideas before his longer stay in Paris, not a finished Parisian style transplanted into Dutch landscape painting. The tree is still there, but its branches can be read as a set of relationships across a shallow pictorial space. The museum explicitly identifies Cubism as an important influence on this reduction of the subject.[1]
Mondrian's break was personal as well as artistic. The museum notes that, after summer 1911, he ended his engagement and prepared to commit himself fully to an artist's life in Paris. Those biographical circumstances help date the painting's moment. They should not be used to assign a private emotion to every gray passage. The visual evidence is more precise: a known natural form has been reorganised so that its lines and the spaces between them matter together.[1]
The 1911, pre-Paris dating reflects the present museum and RKD records. A. B. Loosjes-Terpstra's earlier Dutch study instead discussed Grijze boom as probably made in the Paris period, placing it stylistically between The Red Tree and later Cubist tree paintings. She drew attention to repeated branch rhythms and the restrained greys, black and white. Her proposed chronology demonstrates how scholars have interpreted the transitional style, but it does not overturn the current object record. It is especially useful for seeing why a tree that still looks natural can also be read as an arrangement of recurring lines.[6]
Watch: Piet Mondrian
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Watch on YouTubeHow does it relate to The Red Tree and Flowering Apple Tree?
The tree motif lets us follow a change without pretending that three works form a rigid, preplanned sequence. Avond (Evening): The Red Tree was begun in 1908 and worked on until 1910, according to Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Its red branches stand out strongly from a contrasting blue field. The museum links its initial study to an old apple tree in the garden of Villa Loverendale at Domburg. Those are facts about that earlier picture, not a claim that the gray tree must depict the same physical tree.[4]
In the 1911 painting, the outline of the tree remains readable, but the narrow range of tones makes the separation between branches and background less immediate. Light and dark patches work across the entire surface. The comparison helps show a shift in emphasis: from the striking appearance of a particular tree and light effect toward the pattern made by a tree's structure. It is a difference of pictorial choices, not a simple scale on which one work is more accomplished than another.
The museum dates its Flowering Apple Tree to 1912. In that later canvas, the branching motif is pushed further into a network of marks. It is useful to look back from it to Gray Tree and ask where the natural subject remains clearest. The works can show change over time, but each still has its own composition and catalogue identity. The museum gives Flowering Apple Tree a size of 78.5 × 107.5 cm; that figure belongs to the 1912 canvas, while Gray Tree measures 79.7 × 109.1 cm.[1][5]
Is there a preparatory study?
Yes. The Kunstmuseum holds a separate black-chalk drawing on paper titled Tree: study for The Grey Tree. RKD catalogues the drawing as B3 and the oil painting as B4, both dated 1911. The study is 58.4 × 86.5 cm and has museum object number 0320904. These details should not be confused with the oil painting's material, size or object number.[2][3]
The study's existence reminds us that the elaborate branch arrangement did not have to be improvised wholly on the final canvas. It provides a documented companion for investigating how Mondrian considered the tree motif. Yet a drawing and a painting cannot be treated as interchangeable evidence: oil paint allows changes in tone, overlap and surface that a chalk study handles differently. The museum's drawing record is a useful next stop for readers who want to compare the two objects directly.[3]
Where is the painting now, and why does it matter?
The original Gray Tree is in the collection of Kunstmuseum Den Haag, recorded as object 0334314 and as a bequest from Salomon B. Slijper. The museum calls it The Grey Tree. RKD's catalogue number B4 offers a second, independent way to distinguish it from drawings and other tree paintings with similar names. A visitor interested in seeing it should check the museum's current display information, since collection ownership does not guarantee that a work is on view on any particular day.[1][2]
The picture matters because it makes Mondrian's change of direction visible rather than merely summarising it. The tree is recognizable enough for a viewer to see what is being transformed. Its branches and surroundings, however, are increasingly bound into one surface. The viewer must attend to repeated curves, interruptions, tonal patches and the shape of the whole. This is a richer account than treating the work as an automatic stepping stone to later grids: Gray Tree is a complete painting with its own solution to the problem of making a natural form carry an abstract order.
Can the actual tree be identified?
A tempting claim identifies the model for Gray Tree as an old yew at the Berkenbosch estate in Zeeland. A Dutch Tree Foundation report investigated that suggestion and found it unresolved. One specialist who compared the shapes of Mondrian's tree paintings with the living yew rejected a direct match; another thought studies of more than one tree might have contributed to the painting. Neither position establishes that the surviving yew was the model. The painting itself and the documented black-chalk study are stronger evidence than a present-day resemblance between a tree and a reproduction.[7][3]
This question changes how the picture can be read. Mondrian did not provide the viewer with a botanical label or a documented address in the museum record. He enlarged, cropped and reorganised the branching until the lines and spaces became active over the entire canvas. Even if a particular tree supplied an initial observation, identifying it would not explain every mark in the finished work. The responsible description is a tree motif whose exact physical model remains unproved, while the 1911 date and B3–B4 study-to-painting relationship are supported by the collection and catalogue records.[1][2][7]
Mondrian artworks directory
Frequently asked questions
When did Mondrian paint Gray Tree?
Where is the original Gray Tree?
It is in Kunstmuseum Den Haag, object 0334314, recorded as a bequest of Salomon B. Slijper. Check the museum for current display information.[1]
Is The Grey Tree a different artwork?
Is the black-chalk study the same work?
How large is the painting?
Discussion
Where does the tree seem to end and the gray background begin for you?
Reader Insights
Follow a branch from the trunk outward. At what point does it merge with the ground?
Which dark and light patches make the trunk feel nearest to you?
How does this gray tree change what you notice in The Red Tree or Flowering Apple Tree?
Join the Conversation
Share what you notice in this painting below.
References
- Kunstmuseum Den Haag, collection record for Piet Mondrian, The Grey Tree, object 0334314. View source.
- RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, Mondrian catalogue raisonné, Amsterdam 1911, entries B3 and B4. View source.
- Kunstmuseum Den Haag, collection record for Tree: study for The Grey Tree, object 0320904. View source.
- Kunstmuseum Den Haag, collection record for Avond (Evening): The Red Tree, object 0332041. View source.
- Kunstmuseum Den Haag, collection record for Flowering Apple Tree, object 0332113. View source.
- A. B. Loosjes-Terpstra, Moderne kunst in Nederland 1900–1914, “Het werk,” p. 156, offering an earlier Paris-period dating and formal comparison for Grijze boom. View source.
- Bomenstichting, “Mondriaanboom of niet: Zeeuwse taxus dient de kunsthistorie,” BomenNieuws (summer 2022), reporting the disputed identification of a Berkenbosch yew. View source.
- Lead and annotated image credit. Piet Mondrian, Gray Tree (also The Grey Tree), 1911. Kunstmuseum Den Haag, object 0334314. High-resolution reproduction supplied by the site owner as public domain.
