Piet Mondrian is determined to become a…

Piet Mondrian is determined to become a painter, but at the insistence of his family he first obtains a degree in education; by 1892 he is qualified at age twenty to teach drawing in secondary schools.

This same year, instead of looking for a teaching position, he takes painting lessons from a painter in a small town not far from Winterswijk, where his family resides, and then moves to Amsterdam to register at the Rijksacademie.

Mondrian, the second child of Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Sr., who is an amateur draftsman and headmaster of a Calvinist primary school in Amersfoort, has grown up in a stable yet creative environment; his father is part of the Protestant orthodox circle that has formed around the conservative Calvinist politician Abraham Kuyper, and his uncle, Frits Mondriaan, belongs to the Hague school of landscape painters.

Both uncle and father had given him guidance and instruction when, at age fourteen, he began to study drawing.