CHAPTER XII
Johannes Theodoor (commonly known as Jan) Toorop as born in 1860 at Poerweredjo in Java and was the first to bring from France to Holland, viâ Brussels, the so-called Neo-impressionism of the "Vingtistes." Although in Amsterdam he belonged to the generation described in the preceding chapter, he received his real education amid the great movement of the young Belgians and may be said to have introduced a new phase into Dutch art. In 1889, he arranged, at the Amsterdam panorama an exhibition of the XX, in which he showed his Broek in Waterland and his Twilight Idyll, two pieces painted in broken colour under the Vingtiste influence. The exhibition contained much that was interesting and much that was beautiful, but failed to make any general impression.
Whatever Toorop may have produced before this exhibition and he had already made himself known by some drawings of London poverty of astonishing realism it is certain that his work now struck out an absolutely new line and presented a new aspect of Dutch meadows, of the North-Sea coast and of the motives to be found in the lives of the fisher-folk. This was brought out in his Broek in Waterland, a picture in which the sober lines of a North-Holland pastureland were approached for the first time, intersected with rectilinear ditches, broken only by a few stumpy pollard-willows. It is a view entirely without artificial embellishment, without any search for the harmonious in those fields, where the setting sun filled the ditches with orange light, clashing crudely with the dark green of the meadows and the pale sky. There was no question here of beauty or ugliness: it was the brutal reality, powerfully grasped and strongly expressed.
This picture owed its origin to a trip to North Holland taken while Toorop was living in Brussels with the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren. It was only when seen in this way, as it were with a foreign eye, that the sheer plainness of these meadows and ditches could have been observed and rendered in so ruthless and literal a fashion.
The Wave, the most important work of the first portion of Toorop's residence at Katwijk, is a wonderfully clever and elaborate analysis of the sea, a very feast of movement and colour, a mosaic of variegated tints, with the blue of the sky reflected in the bottle-green wave, the yellow of the fishermen's oilskins, the endless facets of the rippling waters. This work, although not painted in broken colour, already shows a tendency towards a more decorative style of composition.
A third important picture was Melancholy, represented by the figure of a woman of Katwijk-Binnen leaning against the doorpost of her house, with quiet eyes set in a pale oval, a slender little figure and narrow sleeves, appearing mediævally small against the breadth of the endless extent of her petticoats. She stares into the twilight; round her is the little garden with sunflowers and low railings, which look strange in the failing light. The predominant tone of the picture is the dark blue of her apron. To my mind, this Melancholy, so distinguished in its conception, so suggestive in its mood, is Toorop's most interesting work in this direction. Later, his ideas became much more intricate and metaphysical; but in no other work have idea and form, or rather mood and form been more perfectly blended and the result charms at the same time both the eye and the mind.
Thanks to an unusually complex ancestry, Toorop inherited the characteristics of the native East-Indian, the Norseman and the Hollander. Richard Muther, after describing the curious impression which Toorop's work made upon the Viennese public, goes on to prophesy that at some future time he will be known as the Giotto of his day. I do not greatly care to anticipate the verdict of posterity and prefer to say that Giotto, the shepherd, who evolved his first vision of life with charcoal on the walls of the sheepcote, transferred the art of painting from the hierarchical forms of the Byzantines to the living being, whereas Toorop, in depicting nature, makes his human beings the exponents of his ideas. But what Toorop has indeed succeeded in expressing, at an earlier period and to a greater extent than our literature and this, no doubt, is what Dr. Muther meant by his comparison is the scepticism of our time, the decline of established religious belief, the search after new dogmas.