Beach with three or four piers at Domburg

In 1909 Mondrian was spending his summers at Domburg, a small resort on the Zeeland coast, and that same year he joined the Theosophical Society, drawn to the idea that behind the visible world lay a simpler, ordered one. You can feel that pull here. The beach, the sea and the sky are pressed into a few broad horizontal bands, and the piers reaching out into the water are reduced to short marks that break the calm. He built the surface from small touches of colour picked up from the luminist painters he had met on the coast. It is still a real place, painted small at just over 40 centimetres wide, years before the straight lines took over his work completely.