In the Dunes at Domburg

Domburg is a small seaside town on the Dutch island of Walcheren, and from around 1903 Toorop spent his summers there for its famously bright coastal light. Other painters kept coming for the same reason. The young Piet Mondrian worked there too, drawn by the sea and the glare. This is Toorop painting the dunes in small separate dabs of pure color, a technique he had picked up back in 1887 after seeing the work of Georges Seurat, the French inventor of pointillism, though he always used it in his own looser way. Under that bright light the sand and sky break into flecks that only settle into a scene when you step back.