Dune Landscape, 1909 by Piet Mondrian

It was the pictures like Dune Landscape, 1911 that brought Mondrian sudden fame in Holland in 1909. Mondrian's colourful landscape rapidly makes him famous. From 1909 onwards, when he spent the summer on the north Sea coast of Zeeland, he produced a large number of dune paintings and seascapes.

These paintings reveal a distinct development over the course of time: the small, pointilliste dune paintings of 1909 with their positive colouring are succeed by larger, far more abstract composition in 1910.

In the very year of his success, a tragic event occurred that threw Mondrian completely off course - in 1909 his mother died. She was still fairly young and her death must have been unexpected. The finality of this loss appears to have unleashed a virtually self-destruction impulse in Mondrian. Within a very short time he lost the public support for which had fought so long.