Jan Thorn Prikker

The strangest picture Jan Thorn Prikker ever made hangs in this museum. He painted 'The Bride' in 1892 and 1893, in his mid-twenties in The Hague, and it shows a veiled woman drawn in long looping lines toward the crucified Christ, a mystical marriage with flowers and thorns woven through the design. It belongs to Symbolism, the movement that wanted art to carry inner and spiritual states rather than describe the visible world.

He came to that language in good company. In the early 1890s he exhibited with Les Vingt, a circle of avant-garde artists in Brussels, alongside his countryman Jan Toorop, whose flowing linework his own resembles. The elegant curving stylisation they shared is what people would soon call Art Nouveau.

In 1904 Thorn Prikker left the Netherlands for Germany, where he taught at a string of arts-and-crafts schools and remade himself as a designer of monumental religious work. Stained glass is what he is best remembered for there, above all the church windows he made late in life in and around Cologne, where he died in 1932.