Mill at Domburg

The mill is Weltevreden, a grain mill at Domburg on the coast of Zeeland, built in 1817. When Mondrian painted it in 1908 it was still a working mill, and it went on grinding until 1963. That year was his first at Domburg, and the mill became one of the motifs he kept coming back to on later visits.

He painted it close up and from below, on cardboard rather than canvas, a sheet more than three quarters of a metre tall. Almost everything is blue and violet, the sky laid in with broad, blocky strokes. Dutch painters of those years called this way of working luminism, strong unmixed colour meant to carry the glare of the coastal light. A few years later he painted the same mill again in red and pared down much further, and that picture hangs in the same museum in The Hague. The village bought the old mill in 1970 and restored it.