Jan Toorop | the artist

Jan Theodorus Toorop was born on December 20, 1858, in Purworedjo in Java, a background that was to mark his work. His father was part Javanese, his mother of British extraction. In 1869 he went to Holland, where he became a pupil of Tetar van Elven. From 1880 to 1885 he studied successively at the Academies of Amsterdam and Brussels and was influenced by the works of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Edouard Manet, and James Ensor. In 1885 he visited England with the Symbolist poet Emile Verhaeren and there discovered the work of William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites. The following year he married a girl of English-Scottish birth, and lived partly in London, partly in Brussels, until he settled in The Hague in 1889…