Hundreds of short black lines, some horizontal and some vertical, gather into a large oval field on an off-white ground. The lines are loosely spaced and never join into a grid, and they thin out toward the edge of the oval, leaving a pale margin on all sides. The artist's signature and the date, 1915, are at the lower left. According to the Kröller-Müller Museum, Piet Mondrian spent time in 1914 in the seaside resorts of Domburg and Scheveningen and made a series of drawings inspired by the sea and the breakwaters.

In 1915 he based this painting on those drawings, which is why it is sometimes called Pier and Ocean. The museum reads the rolling waves in the long horizontals in the middle of the painting and an abstracted breakwater in the verticals at the bottom. It says this is the first painting in which Mondrian used only black and white. In summer 1980 the museum staged an exhibition called Pier + Ocean, built around this painting, with 55 artists from Europe and America; the museum says it marked a new beginning for art in various ways.

It is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.