Evening rests upon a triadic harmony of yellow, red, and blue, in which chromatic values merge in a characteristic manner. One cannot help but think here of the primary colors of his later abstract paintings. Considering this connection, Robert Welsh noted in his catalogue raisonné that “the coloration in this painting, which includes a striking use of blue, red, and yellow areas, combined with its appearance in public exhibition in the late spring of 1908, means that it is [Mondrian’s] earliest recorded work of art to have incorporated this emphasis upon those three primary colors.” The dominance of the blue sky was noted at the time, and the painting may also be regarded as the earliest recorded example of Mondrian’s "blue tree" period, even though that specific motif does not appear here. This underscores the importance of the work, further reinforced by its ambitious and exceptional format—more than twice as wide as it is high.

This painting indeed reveals a Mondrian before he became “Mondrian,” if one is to identify the artist solely with his works done after 1911, when he began trending toward his renowned, entirely non-objective abstractions. In this transitional moment, in 1908, Mondrian was already thirty-six years old. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam beginning in 1892, and his work was then influenced by the Hague School. This designation encompasses a group of artists who pursued what the Barbizon School had already sought to achieve around 1850: a more direct and intimate form of landscape painting. Evening belongs to this broader artistic context.

Certain details suggest that the artist painted this work while staying in Twente, in the province of Overijssel, where haystacks could be seen—something rather uncommon in the Dutch rural landscape. Mondrian worked in Twente during the summer months between 1906 and 1908. The critic N. H. Wolf noted that this painting was shown at the eighteenth exhibition of the Sint Lucas Guild in Amsterdam, from 3 May to 15 June 1908. One may therefore conclude that Mondrian began it no earlier than late summer 1907, along with two smaller works also representing haystacks in a field (Welsh A559 and A560), in both of which brownish tonalities predominate. Welsh suggests that the date 1908 may have been added to the signature of this painting for purposes of the Sint Lucas exhibition statement.