Dunes near Domburg

Domburg is a small resort on the Zeeland coast, and Mondrian went there because the painter Jan Toorop, who spent his summers in the town, pointed him at the place. He was 38 and still painting what stood in front of him, and the dunes handed him a subject with almost nothing in it. Sand, a horizon, sky. Across those summers the sand turns purple and orange, the drawing thins out, and the long horizontal band starts carrying the picture. He had joined the Dutch branch of the Theosophical Society in 1909, and his Zeeland canvases were already unsettling Amsterdam critics that year. This one is dated 1910 and measures 65 by 96 centimetres. The autumn after he painted it, the Moderne Kunstkring exhibition in Amsterdam put Picasso and Braque in front of him, and within a year he had moved to Paris.