Landscape on the Island of Walcheren

By 1910 the little island of Walcheren, off the Zeeland coast in the southwest of the Netherlands, had become the brightest place a Dutch painter could work. Every summer a colony gathered at Domburg around Jan Toorop, chasing the hard sea light, and that same year Mondrian's Zeeland canvases were the talk of the Amsterdam exhibitions, still full of dunes and sun before he turned to pure abstraction. Hart Nibbrig went for the same light. From a high spot in the dunes he looked down and painted the sweltering summer glare, laying the sea, sky and sand in countless small dashes and dots so that they seem to flow into one another without ever losing their edges. He liked that raised viewpoint and painted the Walcheren dunes many times, at different distances, for the glitter of the Zeeland light. The summer after this one, in 1911, he had a house built for himself down the coast at Zoutelande, so he could keep coming back to it.