Holland - Beach chairs

In late May 1904 Kandinsky and the painter Gabriele Münter came down the Rhine by boat to Rotterdam and spent about four weeks in the Netherlands, until 21 June. They went round museums, Amsterdam, Edam, Volendam and the coastal villages, and from The Hague they cycled out to the sea at Scheveningen. Münter complained that the whole country smelled of chewing tobacco. This little study shows a stretch of beach at Scheveningen or Zandvoort, the museum cannot say which. The hooded wicker chairs were still a fairly new piece of seaside furniture. In Germany their invention is credited to a basket maker in Rostock, who in 1882 built one for a customer with rheumatism who wanted shelter from sun and wind. Kandinsky gives the chairs a few dense strokes of stronger colour, with water and sky above them. The sand below is mostly warm beige touches flecked with blue, and in places he simply left the pale canvas bare.