Blick von den Dünen mit Strand und Molen, Domburg

By 1909 Mondrian was 37 and still painting recognizable Dutch scenery, but something was loosening. He spent parts of those summers at Domburg, a small resort on the Zeeland coast, looking at the same stretch of dunes, sea and sky. Here he has flattened that view into broad orange and blue bands laid down over cardboard, the piers reduced to a few dark strokes. The colours are far stronger than anything the actual beach would show. It is the kind of study where you can watch a careful landscape painter start to care more about the horizontal line itself than about the dunes it describes. He kept returning to Domburg for years, filling sketchbooks with sea and church towers well before the grids arrived.