The Art of Johannes (Jan) Toorop

Born in the Purworejo Regency of the southern Central Java province of the Dutch East Indies in December of 1858, Jan (Jean) Theodorus Toorop was a Dutch-Indonesian painter who influenced the development of Dutch modern art at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gifted and sensitive to new ideas, he originally was influenced by Amsterdam Impressionism and later worked in the Symbolist, Art Nouveau, and Pointillist styles. 

The third of five children born to civil servant Christoffel Theodorus Toorop and Maria Magdalena Cooke, Johannes “Jan” Toorop lived on the island of Bangka, an important mining center in Asia, until he was nine years old. He received his initial education in the city of Batavia, now Jakarta, on the island of Java. In 1869, Toorop traveled to the Netherlands where he continued his education in Delft and Amsterdam. Beginning in 1880, he entered a two-year course of art education with studies under Impressionist painter August Allebé at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie, home to the Amsterdam Impressionist movement.  

In 1883, Toorop enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and became an active member of the avant-garde with travels to Paris and London. He remained in Brussels until 1886, during which time he befriended and shared a studio with Belgian painter William Degouve de Nuncques who became known for his symbolist nocturnal landscapes. In 1883, Toorop joined L’Ensor, an association of artists  opposed to conservative tendencies in art. In the following year, he became a member of Les XX (Les Vingts), the successor group to L’Ensor that centered its theories on the integration of decorative and major arts. 

In 1884, Jan Toorop exhibited his work with the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in Paris; his first solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1885. He traveled on several occasions to England where he became acquainted with the Pre-Raphaelites and such artists as James Whistler and William Morris. During the mid-1880s, Toorop created work in a variety of styles including Realism, Impressionism, and both Neo and Post-Impressionism. 

After his marriage in 1886 to Annie Hall, the daughter of a wealthy, landed English family and a student of music and the French language, Toorop divided his painting between lodgings in England, Brussels, The Hague, and later the Dutch seaside resort town of Katwijk aan Zee. It was in this period that he developed his own personal style of Symbolism: curvilinear designs with stylized gracile figures and dynamic lines based on motifs from the Javanese culture. In 1892, Toorop exhibited these works at the Salon de la Rose + Croix in Paris and at The Hague’s Circle for the Arts, of which he was a founding member. 

Jan Toorop became influenced in the mid 1890s by the Art Nouveau movement, known in the Netherlands as Noul Stil (New Style) or Nieuwe Kunst (New Art), and created several commercial poster and advertisement designs in this style. After exhibitions in Copenhagen, Dresden and Munich in 1898. he began an extended period of residence at a small marketplace house located in the seaside town of Domburg situated on the northwest coast of the Dutch province of Zeeland. Among Toorop’s many associates at Domburg were such artists as Piet Mondrian, one of the founders of the De Stijl art movement, and Dutch seascape painter Marinus Zwart.

Toorop converted to Roman Catholicism in 1905 and shortly afterward changed his name to Johannes and divorced his wife. In addition to his book illustrations and poster works, he began to produce religious works, including stained glass designs in a more geometrical linear style. After several years of residence at the Dutch city of Nijmegen, Toorop relocated in 1916 to The Hague. Beginning in 1917, he suffered from a partial paralysis that increasingly affected his later production, a series of works inspired by both religion and mysticism. 

Considered to be the most avant-garde artist in the Netherlands at the turn of the twentieth-century, Johannes (Jan) Toorop died at the age of sixty-nine in The Hague at the beginning of March in 1928. His works are in many private collections and such public collections as the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterio and the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, both in the Netherlands. 

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jan Toorop”, circa 1920-1923, Vintage Photograph, Getty Images

Second Insert Image: Jan Toorop, “Delftsche Sloalie”, 1894, Lithograph, Illustration for Delft Salad Oil Advertisement, Limegreen and Black over Pink Ink on Paper, 86 x 56 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jan Toorop, “Madonna and Child”, 1924, Pencil and Colored Crayons on Paper, 26.5 x 21 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jan Toorop, “Self Portrait”, 1915, Black Chalk on Paper, 23.3 x 20 cm, Kunstmuseum, The Hague