* This piece was published this week in an abridged form in the Daily Mail. Here is the full, unedited version.

I always loved Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and admired Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.

But Victory Boogie-Woogie by fellow Dutch artist Piet Mondrian? No, I hadn’t heard of it either – until a recent trip to Holland.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the death of the Dutch abstract artist – famous for his brightly coloured grid-like designs – and two major new exhibitions will celebrate his legacy this summer.

Mondrian and Colour, focusing on his early works, opens at Turner Contemporary, Margate, in May. Focusing on his later work, Mondrian and his Studios, opens at Tate Liverpool in June.

Art trail

I’ve come to Holland for a preview of works to feature in both exhibitions, tracing a route by train from Amersfoort, the small town near Utrecht where Mondrian was born in 1872, to The Hague, where many of his works are collected in the Gemeentemuseum.

On the morning I arrive in the canal-side town of Amersfoort, spring tulips are exploding into colour amid the maze of tiny streets and wave-lapping waterways.

The Mondriaanhaus, the former home where the family lived until 1880, is now a small but compelling museum devoted to Mondrian’s life and work.

It includes a permanent exhibition of his early paintings and a recreation of the Paris apartment-studio at 26 Rue du Depart, where he lived and worked from 1921 to 1936. Curator Marjory Degen says:

“There’s a lot more to Mondrian than the straight lines and primary colours we think of.”

“I’m fascinated by his philosophy. He wanted to let go of the natural world and achieve a cleaner, more prefect vision of paradise,” she adds, sitting in the recreated Paris studio, a video installation of a bespectacled Mondrian smoking a cigarette projected onto the red-cushioned sofa.

Half-drawn squares of primary colours add bright, clean lines to the walls around us.

Later that day in nearby Utrecht I wander the historic streets of 12^th-century old city, exploring the medieval passageways around Dom Square and dipping into the cloistered gardens of Dom Cathedral, where daffodils and crocuses bring splashes of primary colours to gargoyle-watched tranquility.

Over a local wheat beer in Café Olivier, a buzzy little beer café with a fine line in lunchtime goodies and interesting brews, I find myself spotting nods to Mondrian’s love of colour and form all around me.

Art movement

The De Stijl movement of abstract art, of which Mondrian was a leading light, was born out of the First World War and set out to deliberately challenge the ideas of the traditional art establishment.

The Gemeentemuseum at my next stop, The Hague, devotes a whole new wing to De Stijl. I spend a lazy morning the next day perusing the artworks, including works by Theo van Doesburg and Janus de Winter, the canvases full of egalitarian straight lines and vibrant colours.

Like other art movements, such as Bauhaus and the Viennese Secession based around the work of Klimt, it makes look at the artworks differently, finding new forms in the brushstrokes.

The museum also houses the world’s largest collection of Mondrian’s work – some 298 items backed with regular temporary exhibitions.

It traces his artistic development from dreamlike landscapes to embracing color after he relocated to Paris in 1919, eschewing his rather staid reputation to celebrate the music and vitality of the jazz age. His subsequent move to New York in 1940 cemented his love of grid-style lines and the syncopation of jazz.

“Every morning I walk through the gallery and see Schiele and Picasso. But then I see Mondrian’s Composition with Grey Lines (1918) and I fall in love all over again,” says Hans Janssen [pictured above], head curator of modern at the Gemeentemuseum.

“If you deliver yourself to the painting, then it is very rewarding. It becomes the love of your life.”

After exploring the gallery, I catch the tram back into the old town to explore the cobbled streets and Gothic buildings around the central square, Buitenhof.

Nearby, The Mauritshuis, home to Vermeer’s masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring, recently re-opened following two years of renovations that put the world-famous painting back at the heart of the new exhibition space.

Landscape frame

Afterwards, I grab a window seat at Dudok, the elegant cafe with its rack of art magazines and enticing aroma of fresh coffee, and indulge in a spot of people watching while tucking into a large cappuccino and a slice of traditional Dutch Apple pie, served warm with cinnamon ice-cream.

Dinner that night is at Catch by Simonis, a harbourside fish restaurant across town in the Scheveningen area. It forms part of a huddle of lively little bars and restaurants at the far end of Strandweg, an expansive seaside promenade that curls around the sand dunes of The Hague’s seaside district.

After tucking into oysters and pan-fried plaice, washed down with a crisp glass of white, I catch the tram back to my hotel through the moonlight-embracing streets.

The primary colours of the shop signs and straight lines of the tram tracks are reflected in post-downpour puddles like the brushstrokes of Mondrian’s multilayered, albeit sometimes challenging, works.

I didn’t know much about Mondrian before I came to Holland. But now, some 70 years after his death, I see him everywhere around me.

Van Gogh and Rembrandt may have captured a moment in time but Mondrian has, I feel, become part of Holland’s eternal landscape.

GAZETTEER

Mondrian and Colour is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, from May 24 to September 21; Mondrian and his Studios: Abstraction into the World is at Tate Liverpool June 6 to October 5.

More from holland.com

* Read the edited story at Daily Mail Travel, Art is all around in Inspiring Holland.

There were, I’m reliably informed, some 192kg of cheese consumed. Add to that around 1,816 litres of milk and 9,600 portions of butter.

That’s what it takes to a galley crew of 62 to feed a Fred Olsen cruise through the Norwegian fjords for a week.

I love a bit of Brie but even I couldn’t get through that much cheese. Nor could my cruise companion, my father [pictured above], who was finding his sea legs on his first cruise and happily avoiding the fried-breakfast buffet in favour of healthier fare.

It was, in fact, something of a cruise-detox week all round with lots of fresh air, tranquil Norwegian landscapes and fresh fish for dinner most nights, all washed down with lashings of green tea.

Aside from the cabaret comedian stuck in 1972 and the grab-a-granny disco, it was primarily quiet time.

But that suited us both fine.

Read the full story in September’s Cruise Style supplement with the Daily Telegraph.

* An edited version of this story first appeared in the Weekend FT on June 28. Here’s my full version.

The schnapps came out just after noon.

We were tucking into an alfresco fika (snack) of open sandwiches, summer fruits and particularly succulent herrings when, in celebration of midsummer, Bengt decided a shot of Aquavit was called for.

“Brings out the flavour of the herring,” he winked.

Bengt and Elisabeth Svartholm [pictured above] had welcomed me to their smallholding on the West Swedish island of Tjorn for an introduction to Sweden’s traditional midsummer festivities.

They started welcoming visitors as part of a new project, Meet the Swedes, which offers a grass-roots take on Swedish culture via homestays and family meals. To understand the importance of the annual midsummer party to Swedes, it seemed a good place to start.

“Midsummer evokes all five senses,” explained Elisabeth, washing a large tub of strawberries in the kitchen, a bucket of newly picked elderflowers to make cordial by her freshly painted toes.

“I still remember as a girl running in the fields with no shoes to pick flowers for garlands and the smell of cut grass in the barn for animal feed.”

On the terrace outside, she has tied tiny strips of blue and yellow fabric (the colours of the Swedish flag) to plants blooming in the sun-warmed pots.

Summer festival 

Swedes take midsummer very seriously — think New Year’s Eve and a public-holiday weekend all rolled into one.

They down tools and head for their summer houses on the coast for a family gathering lubricated by beer, herring and shots of the local firewater. Whether you’re a builder or a banker, it’s the one day of the year that everyone casts aside their daily routine and goes back to the land.

I had arrived in West Sweden the previous day, driving some 90 minutes north from Gothenburg through a bucolic landscape of grazing pasture and produce-yielding farmland.

People were picking midsummer flowers and berries as I passed. The biggest hint to the gathering momentum of festivities, however, was the burgeoning queues at village fish shops and the rising crescendo of tutting locals as the herring prices headed north as if making a break for the Norwegian border.

I stopped for lunch and a look around the galleries at the Nordic Watercolour Museum in the harbour village of Skarhamn. It was there I found restaurant manager Anders Arena perusing a new exhibition of works by the Swedish artist Lars Lerin.

He appeared particularly drawn to Inland Sea, a watercolour collage of birch leaves, wild flowers and seashells. “Midsummer is a celebration to welcome the light of the longest day,” says Anders, stroking his lustrous sandy beard thoughtfully.

“We don’t think about the fact the days will start getting shorter again.”

Folklore traditions

On midsummer’s eve I headed northeast to forested Ljungskile to join the midsummer banquet at Villa Sjotorp, a romantic, early 20th-century summerhouse rescued from dereliction by the great-granddaughter of the original owner.

The lakeside property has been recently reborn as a country-house hotel and restaurant. I arrived just in time for a quick class in making my own krans, a headband of summer flowers entwined around soft birch branches.

According to Swedish folklore, I had to place the krans under my pillow that night to dream of my future wife.

Down the road on the village green, a crowd of local families and a few curious bystanders had started gathering from mid afternoon to watch the annual midsummer dance around the maypole.

The spectacle appears to blend elements of ancient German and British folklore but, while the phallic maypole and spiritual embracing of warming rays both feature, the event is a strictly Morris Dancing free zone.

Children, some in traditional dresses, clutch their parents’ hands while local teenagers, resplendent in their chicest summer garb, exchanged flirtatious glances as the accordion player struck up a rousing chorus of folk tunes.

A singer, a garland of wild flowers blooming atop her bleached mane of dreadlocks, lead the crowd through a series of line-dancing style routines. To a non-Swedish speaker such as myself, it was rather bewildering – a bit like gate crashing a church fete and finding the entire congregation squatting on the ground in a frog dance.

“Ah, the frog dance,” laughed the staff back at the hotel knowingly. “We all learnt it as children but, to this day, we don’t know why we dance like frogs for midsummer.”

Supper spread

Dance routines and head decorations completed, we then got down to the serious business that evening of celebrating with traditional food and drink.

The four-course supper included a starter of three types of herring, served with crème fraîche and new potatoes, mains of cuts of beef, chicken and lamb with tomato salad and a deliciously tangy smoked mayonnaise. There was cheese and strawberries to finish.

On a post-prandial walk around the village about 11pm, I found the sense of contented tranquillity across West Sweden was almost tangible.

The only sounds on my way down to the sunset-illuminated lake were murmurs of conversation from al-fresco family gatherings and the distant thrum of an acoustic sing-along at a local summerhouse. It was a rare moment of perfect equilibrium in our spin-cycle modern lives.

Back at the smallholding, meanwhile, Bent and I had been putting the world to rights over pastries and coffee when he emerged from the kitchen with a new bottle of Aquavit and a glint in his eye. Children from the nearby village were gathering flowers in the fields and the tantalising aroma of fried fish drifted by on the summer breeze.

But how will Sweden reconcile itself the next morning, I asked, to the fact that the days are getting shorter again and, after the hedonistic carpe diem of midsummer, winter will be just a few short months away.

Bengt pondered a moment and answered with a final flourish of his trademark dry-laconic humour.

“I will be laying on the sofa,” he deadpanned, “groaning and eating take-away pizza.”

* Click here for the link to the FT-published piece, Sweden’s Midsummer Madness.

Gazetteer

Simply Sweden

West Sweden Tourist Board