Toorop etching

JAN TOOROP                                                                      Java 1855  – 1928 The Hague

In het bos [In the woods].

Drypoint printed in orange ink; 1895. Annotated ‘pointe seche’ and signed in black ink. A very fine impression, in very good condition, a stain from an old mat visible outside the platemark. Rijksmuseum 17, the first of two states, before much additional drypoint work in the background.  A rare early Toorop drypoint landscape, especially beautiful in this essentially unfinished state.

Our impression, the first impression of this drypoint we have ever seen in trade, represents Toorop’s combination of realism and abstraction to a notable degree, especially in this impression of the first state, before much additional work in the background and on the tree trunks and limbs.

Born in Indonesia to a British mother and a Indonesian–Dutch father, Toorop left Indonesia in 1869 and began to study art in Delft, and by 1880 at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

By the mid 1890s Toorop had encountered Art Nouveau, by then what amounted to an international pictorial style. Allied to Symbolism, the new style was practiced in every country of Europe and America. The principal pictorial qualities of this new style were an idyllic and elegant movement of forms that united animal and vegetal forms in swirling movement. Although his early career spans the period of Art Nouveau and Symbolism in European art, it is only by extension that his art can be seen as fully participating in these movements. The wiry angularity of Toorop’s forms may be contrasted with the fanciful and abstract movement of Art Nouveau. He juxtaposed elegant repeat patterns often of disparate materials such as textiles, leaf and tree forms, and even roof tiles and other architectural elements to create images of cloisonné refinement and elegance.

A highly gifted and experimental draftsman, Toorop brought his own Indonesian background to his art, giving this style a highly individual character. His wiry, tense use of line, another aspect of his Indonesian heritage, was admirably suited to the medium of drypoint. His compositions, whether in small format, as here, or in larger images, are deeply intimate. Toorop, it is fair to say, was also a colorist; he regularly experimented with printing in colors.

It is fair to say that the artists working in the Netherlands during this period created arguably the most distinctive formulation of Art Nouveau, even if it has only in the past thirty years been the subject of study and collecting interest.  Clifford S. Ackley’s recent catalogue for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Holland on Paper, 2014, is the most complete and authoritative discussion of the period.

100 x 100 mm     3 15/16 x 3 15/16 inches