Seascape

This small marine study carries no date, which suits it, because it belongs to the stretch of Theo van Doesburg's career that his later fame tends to erase. Before De Stijl and its rules, he was simply a Dutch painter who went down to the coast and painted the sea, as generations here had done before him: water, a wide sky, a low horizon, taken straight from what stood in front of him. Little else is recorded about this particular canvas, beyond that it comes from those early years spent looking at the North Sea.