Mondrian’s father was the headmaster of a school in Amersfoort. He was also an amateur artist and a gifted draughtsman who encouraged his son to draw at an early age and perhaps also imparted his love of music. It was Mondrian’s uncle, Frits, his father’s brother, though, who taught him how to paint.

Inge Vos, a private tour guide with Amersfoortse Gidsen, which offers a Mondrian-related tour, explained to me that the small town developed rapidly during the artist’s early childhood, when its first shopping street, tramway and railway were built.

“We think this probably influenced him,” she said, “because if so many things around you change, you start to wonder about the truth of everything. He became fascinated with technology and change.”

For the next part of my journey, I traveled by train 2.5 hours to Winterswijk, about as far east as you can travel in the Netherlands before crossing the German border, about five miles away. This was the second town where Mondrian lived, between 1880 and 1892, and where he began his artistic journey. His family home here, a grand white three-story house called the Villa Mondriaan, has also been converted into a museum devoted to his life story. It stands next to the former National School of Christian Instruction, where his father took another headmaster post.

Thanks to a loan from the Gemeentemuseum, the Villa Mondriaan contains an exhibition of artworks by Mondrian, with a particular focus on his early pictures. Here, I could witness the beginning stages of his process of artistic discovery: a sketch of a girl that he completed while studying fine arts at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, a portrait of a boy leaning on a fence he made at about age 21, and watercolors of landscapes in and around Winterswijk. All indicate a precocious talent for drawing, a clear interest in depicting qualities of light, and — perhaps not surprisingly — a very strong attention to line.