After the Strike

The late 1880s were hard years in the coal and iron towns of southern Belgium, where Toorop was living and exhibiting. Strikes over wages and hunger were met with troops, and in places like Charleroi they ended in bloodshed. This picture carries the aftermath. A man and a boy carry away a worker who has been killed or badly hurt, and behind them a woman follows with a child in her arms, the child dressed in white. Toorop had come back from London admiring William Morris, who wanted an art made for ordinary people, and here he turned that idea onto a real event, painting it in the small dabs of colour he had taken from the new pointillism. He keeps the horizon high and the tones muted, purples and greys and browns, and lets a handful of figures carry the whole weight of it.