Beach with Five Piers at Domburg

The five piers in the title are breakwaters. Along the beach at Domburg, on the Dutch coast of Zeeland, rows of wooden posts were driven into the sand and run out into the sea to stop the tides carrying the beach away. The Dutch call them paalhoofden, and here, in 1909, Mondrian set them down as dark narrow strips cutting across bands of blue water under a lilac sky, on a small canvas, 33 by 42 centimetres, later mounted on board.

The picture belonged to Sidney Janis, a New York shirt manufacturer who became one of the city's leading art dealers. He and his wife Harriet met Mondrian on their trips to Paris between the wars, and in 1949 his gallery held an exhibition of Mondrian's paintings from 1910 to 1944. The collection passed to their son Conrad, a jazz trombonist and a film and television actor. After his death in 2022 the beach came to the Museum of Fine Arts, in 2023, among 34 paintings, drawings and watercolours by Mondrian given through the trust of Conrad and his wife Maria.