Scheveningen

In May 1904 Kandinsky was 38 and living out of suitcases. He had abandoned a career in law in Moscow eight years earlier to study painting in Munich, and from 1903 he was travelling almost continuously with the painter Gabriele Munter, who had been his student. That spring took them through the Netherlands. Scheveningen, the fishing village beside The Hague, had by then grown into one of the largest bathing resorts on the North Sea, with an enormous Kurhaus on the sand and trains delivering holidaymakers to the beach. He worked there as he worked on all those trips, quickly and small, on pieces of cardboard he could carry, this one about 24 by 33 centimetres, laying the paint on with a knife. His widow Nina Kandinsky left it to the Pompidou in Paris in 1981.