Dr. J.F.S. Esser (1877-1946) was a true Renaissance man. Not only an innovative surgeon who pioneered plastic surgery, he was also a casino owner, a seigneur and even a vaudeville impresario. In addition to his many accomplishments in the field of medicine, Esser was passionate about art. Esser’s patient, the artist Jan Sluijters, opened his eyes to the world of Dutch modernism, including Leo Gestel, Piet van der Hem and Piet Mondrian. Between 1906 and 1912, Esser collected over 1000 artworks, many of which he traded for his medical services. In 1906, the Singer Museum in Laren curated an exhibition titled The Unstoppable Collector J.F.S. Esser, which showed a wide range of his collection, demonstrating how important Esser was to the adaptation of modern art in The Netherlands. It is no surprise that Esser’s taste in art led him to the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García, who spent over forty years living abroad in Europe. During a period in Paris that began in 1926, Torres-García met Piet Mondrian. Along with Michel Seuphor, Mondrian and Torres-García would go on to found the movement Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square). Painted during this period, the present lot exemplifies Torres-García's early experiments in Constructivism, as portrayed in the gridded pictorial landscape that breaks down the scene into flat, simplified shapes.