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拍品专文
"That is how it happens. I have posed only three times, of which two times with all kinds of accidents [...] And now, after posing for the third time head, neck and hand are already on the canvas in full likeness and in fair human whiteness. He is stippling the portrait: that is called divisioning, in oils on smooth white canvas." These lines were written by the sitter of this portrait, 34-year-old Marie Jeanette de Lange in her diary on February 22, 1900. The painter Jan Toorop had travelled from his residence in Katwijk to Scheveningen, where Jeanette de Lange lived with her husband Jan Cornelis Bouman, a highly-placed civil servant. She deplored that she had not taken care to send a carriage to fetch Toorop, who had to struggle his way through a blizzard: 'I imagine that I can hear his joints crack, benumbed as they seem to be with cold.'
Around 1900, Jeanette and her husband used to spend the summer months in the Badhotel in Domburg, Zeeland, where they probably met Toorop, who was a regular there. With great enthousiasm, Jeanette de Lange embraced the new, alternative medical concepts of self-regulating health care of Dr. Mezger, who resided in Domburg and drew a host of distinguished visitors to the Zeeland resort. Jeanette de Lange was an active woman. She was the president of the 'Vereeniging voor Verbetering van Vrouwenkleding' [Association for the Improvement of Women's Clothes], for which she lectured throughout the country; she designed her own furniture and dabbled in painting. In short, she rejected the stifling corset of 19th century femininity for reform clothes and belonged to the well-to-do class of women who dedicated themselves to a civilized style of liberation, to a life of health, purity and sometimes unclear spiritual yearnings.
The terms in which she describes the portrait Toorop was painting of her, betray this quest for purity: 'fair human whiteness'. Eager to learn, she jotted down Toorop's thoughts while he was at work: '"This is it", he says, "this is the only way. This is the way we all have to follow to obtain true, pure art. Follow nature, follow nature as close and as careful as possible; when you feel it is beautifull, than it will become beautiful".
Purity was a central concept in the high-minded esthetics and world-view that was shared by artist and sitter. But they were not the only ones that would be touched by the paintings beauty. The notorious and feared critic Lodewijk van Deyssel was in raptures over this portrait that he called 'a precious and tender, white delight, at once entirely luminous and enlightened'.
It is not hard to sympathize with the critic's enthusiasm. Toorop has filled his carefully drawn and precise pencil lines with a snowstorm of minuscule, brightly coloured dots that leave the white underpainting visible throughout the surface. This technique gives the painting a unique etherial quality. The combination of consummate draughtmanship and fine stippling makes this portrait perhaps the finest Toorop ever made.
Jeanette de Lange is stepped in her reading; she lovingly touches an illustration. Her bosom and the book are brightly lit to a purple white by a shining kerosine lamp. The table on which the lamp is standing is covered by a cloth with a flowery pattern. On the cloth, a drinking glass with flowers, and behind the sitter a bigger vase carries a generous bunch of flowers that melts with the brightly coloured flower-patterns on the wall.
A comparable, slightly earlier portrait by Toorop, although infinitely less charming than in this one is the 'Print-lover', a portrait of the scholar Aegidius Timmerman (Otterlo, Museum Kröller-Müller). Toorop had started this portrait in 1898 only to finish it in 1900. The sitter, author and teacher of classical languages, has left us a remarkable description of Toorop's entourage of adoring ladies in his memoirs 'Tim's herinneringen' of 1938. With his exotic Javanese looks and his penchant for the Unexplicable, Toorop exerted a mesmerizing influence upon his admirers. Although he wrote disparagingly about Toorop as a thinker, Timmerman acknowledged the artist's remarkable craftsmanship. He had developed an incisive, decorative linear style in the 1890's, that he now combined with the neo-impressionist technique that he had learned from Seurat and Signac in 1886. The painstaking process of minute stippling had as its consequence that Toorop made no more than five paintings a year. He soon dropped this style for a broader, more expressive stippling technique.
Theo van Rysselberghe, who was a friend of Toorop, and like him a member of the Brussels avant-garde group Les XX and its successor Libre Esthétique, had already successfully applied a very fine stippling technique in his portraits of the later nineties, notably in the great portrait of his wife (Otterlo, Museum Kröller-Müller). In the 1902 Salon of the Libre Esthétique, where Toorop exhibited this portrait of Jeanette Bouman, Rysselberghe showed another stippled portrait of his wife and daughter (Brussels, Musées Royales des Beaux-Arts).
Toorop, however, succeeded in striking a quite different, poetical note in this portrait of Jeanette Bouman that makes Rysselberghe's portraits and even his own 'Print Lover' seem almost prosaic. The neo-impressionist dot technique had originated as a method to render natural light in a systematic way, based on recent scientific theories about the nature of light. In the portrait of Jeanette Bouman Toorop not just uses dots to successfully suggest the artificial light that pervades the scene; they also dissolve the boundaries between the objects that seem to fuse into a flowery, almost abstract and suggestive pattern. In the process, stippling has become a hallmark of modernity. With Signac, it became the carrier of political striving, whereas with Toorop, it started to signify the longing for the spiritual.
Flowers are rare in February, so Toorop created an artificial scene by surrounding his sitter with flowers. The juxtaposition of a beautiful female face and flowers was a frequent theme in symbolist art. In the early nineties, Toorop's artist friend Odilon Redon had already recognized the possibility of combining a female face in profile with flowery, abstract forms that seem to represent the sitter's beautiful thoughts. 'Fille-fleurs', Redon had called them, alluding to the spiritual 'Blumenmädchen' in Wagner's Parsifal. Moreover, Redon had successfully applied a metaphorical use of light, ultimately deriving from Rembrandt. Toorop suggests in this portrait that light streaming down from the lamp on the book and reflecting in the sitter's face is the spiritual enlightenment Jeanette Bouman receives from her reading. Her spiritual thoughts are as beautiful as the flowers that surround her.
Understandably the descendants of the sitter have never parted with this portrait. Since 1905 it has been hanging in the family estate in the Netherlands. Realizing its artistic quality, the family has lent it to several important exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad. This wise policy helped to spread the fame of this painting, one of the most beautiful portraits Toorop ever painted.
To be included in the catalogue raisonné on the artist's work,
currently being prepared by G.W.C. van Wezel.
We kindly thank Dr. F.W.G. Leeman for his help in cataloguing this lot.
Around 1900, Jeanette and her husband used to spend the summer months in the Badhotel in Domburg, Zeeland, where they probably met Toorop, who was a regular there. With great enthousiasm, Jeanette de Lange embraced the new, alternative medical concepts of self-regulating health care of Dr. Mezger, who resided in Domburg and drew a host of distinguished visitors to the Zeeland resort. Jeanette de Lange was an active woman. She was the president of the 'Vereeniging voor Verbetering van Vrouwenkleding' [Association for the Improvement of Women's Clothes], for which she lectured throughout the country; she designed her own furniture and dabbled in painting. In short, she rejected the stifling corset of 19th century femininity for reform clothes and belonged to the well-to-do class of women who dedicated themselves to a civilized style of liberation, to a life of health, purity and sometimes unclear spiritual yearnings.
The terms in which she describes the portrait Toorop was painting of her, betray this quest for purity: 'fair human whiteness'. Eager to learn, she jotted down Toorop's thoughts while he was at work: '"This is it", he says, "this is the only way. This is the way we all have to follow to obtain true, pure art. Follow nature, follow nature as close and as careful as possible; when you feel it is beautifull, than it will become beautiful".
Purity was a central concept in the high-minded esthetics and world-view that was shared by artist and sitter. But they were not the only ones that would be touched by the paintings beauty. The notorious and feared critic Lodewijk van Deyssel was in raptures over this portrait that he called 'a precious and tender, white delight, at once entirely luminous and enlightened'.
It is not hard to sympathize with the critic's enthusiasm. Toorop has filled his carefully drawn and precise pencil lines with a snowstorm of minuscule, brightly coloured dots that leave the white underpainting visible throughout the surface. This technique gives the painting a unique etherial quality. The combination of consummate draughtmanship and fine stippling makes this portrait perhaps the finest Toorop ever made.
Jeanette de Lange is stepped in her reading; she lovingly touches an illustration. Her bosom and the book are brightly lit to a purple white by a shining kerosine lamp. The table on which the lamp is standing is covered by a cloth with a flowery pattern. On the cloth, a drinking glass with flowers, and behind the sitter a bigger vase carries a generous bunch of flowers that melts with the brightly coloured flower-patterns on the wall.
A comparable, slightly earlier portrait by Toorop, although infinitely less charming than in this one is the 'Print-lover', a portrait of the scholar Aegidius Timmerman (Otterlo, Museum Kröller-Müller). Toorop had started this portrait in 1898 only to finish it in 1900. The sitter, author and teacher of classical languages, has left us a remarkable description of Toorop's entourage of adoring ladies in his memoirs 'Tim's herinneringen' of 1938. With his exotic Javanese looks and his penchant for the Unexplicable, Toorop exerted a mesmerizing influence upon his admirers. Although he wrote disparagingly about Toorop as a thinker, Timmerman acknowledged the artist's remarkable craftsmanship. He had developed an incisive, decorative linear style in the 1890's, that he now combined with the neo-impressionist technique that he had learned from Seurat and Signac in 1886. The painstaking process of minute stippling had as its consequence that Toorop made no more than five paintings a year. He soon dropped this style for a broader, more expressive stippling technique.
Theo van Rysselberghe, who was a friend of Toorop, and like him a member of the Brussels avant-garde group Les XX and its successor Libre Esthétique, had already successfully applied a very fine stippling technique in his portraits of the later nineties, notably in the great portrait of his wife (Otterlo, Museum Kröller-Müller). In the 1902 Salon of the Libre Esthétique, where Toorop exhibited this portrait of Jeanette Bouman, Rysselberghe showed another stippled portrait of his wife and daughter (Brussels, Musées Royales des Beaux-Arts).
Toorop, however, succeeded in striking a quite different, poetical note in this portrait of Jeanette Bouman that makes Rysselberghe's portraits and even his own 'Print Lover' seem almost prosaic. The neo-impressionist dot technique had originated as a method to render natural light in a systematic way, based on recent scientific theories about the nature of light. In the portrait of Jeanette Bouman Toorop not just uses dots to successfully suggest the artificial light that pervades the scene; they also dissolve the boundaries between the objects that seem to fuse into a flowery, almost abstract and suggestive pattern. In the process, stippling has become a hallmark of modernity. With Signac, it became the carrier of political striving, whereas with Toorop, it started to signify the longing for the spiritual.
Flowers are rare in February, so Toorop created an artificial scene by surrounding his sitter with flowers. The juxtaposition of a beautiful female face and flowers was a frequent theme in symbolist art. In the early nineties, Toorop's artist friend Odilon Redon had already recognized the possibility of combining a female face in profile with flowery, abstract forms that seem to represent the sitter's beautiful thoughts. 'Fille-fleurs', Redon had called them, alluding to the spiritual 'Blumenmädchen' in Wagner's Parsifal. Moreover, Redon had successfully applied a metaphorical use of light, ultimately deriving from Rembrandt. Toorop suggests in this portrait that light streaming down from the lamp on the book and reflecting in the sitter's face is the spiritual enlightenment Jeanette Bouman receives from her reading. Her spiritual thoughts are as beautiful as the flowers that surround her.
Understandably the descendants of the sitter have never parted with this portrait. Since 1905 it has been hanging in the family estate in the Netherlands. Realizing its artistic quality, the family has lent it to several important exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad. This wise policy helped to spread the fame of this painting, one of the most beautiful portraits Toorop ever painted.
To be included in the catalogue raisonné on the artist's work,
currently being prepared by G.W.C. van Wezel.
We kindly thank Dr. F.W.G. Leeman for his help in cataloguing this lot.