Born on the Island of Java in the then Dutch East Indies in 1858, Toorop’s family moved to the Netherlands in 1869. In 1880 he studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Delft and in Amsterdam. From 1882 to 1886 he lived in Brussels and Machelen, where he shared a studio with the Belgium symbolist William Degouve de Nuncques. When Toorop was invited to join the newly formed Lex XX (Les Vingt) in 1884, he became immediately part of the inner circle of the “revolutionaries”: James Ensor and Fernand Khnopff, even although membership was initially not granted to foreigners.[1]

Throughout his career, Toorop focused on portraits, in sketches, drawings and paintings. Like his contemporary Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), both artists were fascinated in the 1880s by the fate of the unskilled worker and the poor, and the simplicity of rural life. The plight of the yarn winders, a typical textile industry in Flanders, inspired Toorop to produce one of his first monumental paintings in 1883, two years before Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters. This painting of the Yarn Winders would be one of the largest canvases Toorop were ever to paint. Le Pauvre seems to be the only watercolor connected to the painting.

After the collapse of the textile industry in 1840 in Belgium, owed to manufacturing success of Great Britain’s industrialization, local population continued to suffer throughout the nineteenth century. Abandoned by the liberal Francophone elite, which ran the country and its national banks, Flanders was hit the hardest and poverty ensured. A fundamental division in Belgian society emerged: the French-speaking liberal bourgeoisie in the south supported by the high clergy and focused on the industrial bonanza in Wallonia, opposite of the dense, rural, Catholic population of Flanders, supported by the low clergy and local bank, ensuing the influence of the boerenbond (farmers’ trade union). Since the present figure study bears the inscription Le Pauvre (the poor), there is no doubt that it is the predicament of the local community Toorop encountered in Belgium that inspired him, as evidenced in a second appearance of the subject of our watercolor.

[1] G. van Wezel, Jan Toorop. Zang der Tijden, The Hague 2016, p. 18