Appels met landschap

Toorop painted this in 1946, the first full year after the German occupation of the Netherlands ended. Here she does something she usually kept apart in her fruit pictures: behind the apples set close to the viewer she opens a stretch of the flat Dutch countryside, so the two are held in a single frame. The apples keep the hard, sculpted solidity she gave everything she painted, and the land behind them belongs to the country around Bergen where she lived and worked. After years in which ordinary life had been anything but ordinary, a still life of homegrown fruit above a quiet horizon carried its own quiet weight. She was 55 that year, painting the fruit of her own garden as she had done since the mid-1930s.