Church Tower at Domburg

Mondrian completed a number of artworks based on the front facade of a church in Zeeland. This version features more on the top of the building, which was cropped out in Sun, Church in Zeeland, Zoutelande Church Facade.

Here we find a fractured set of squares which make up the sky behind the main church. The pointilist approach used elsewhere is gone, with clearer areas of single tones. The colour scheme is modernist in style, almost as if a the colours have been reversed in a similar way to a photograph negative. The result is a calmer finish, with shadows visible in the lower part of the church facade. It is likely that Mondrian wanted to experiment with different ways of capturing the very same item, and he also produced a drawing of this building in pen and ink. During this period he was particularly experimental and perhaps found this quite part of the Netherlands as an ideal spot for thinking and considering new ideas.

In the main, all of his work in this region were seascapes, so this church depiction is unusual in that regard. He uses the same colours from the sky in elements of the church in order to provide a consistent colour scheme in this painting. The main brickwork is an orangy brown which feels somewhere near reality, but the rest is expressively done. Even some of the squares making up the sky suddenly appear over the church tower, but themselves more resemble broken shards of glass or cracked ice in a frozen lake. We can see here suggestions of where Mondrian was heading, but it still feels a long way from the truly abstract series of squares and lines which dominated the latter part of his career.

This artwork from 1911 is sometimes called different names, such as the Dutch title of Zeeuws(ch)e kerktoren, or Zeeland Church Tower. It is over a metre tall and made use of oil on canvas. It is now a part of the collection of the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, Netherlands, and sits alongside a number of his seascapes from this region. They possess a good number of some of his less famous landscape paintings and could be considered a must-visit location for those looking to understand he true breadth of Mondrian's oeuvre.