Backwater in London

In 1885 Toorop crossed to London for the first time, and the city changed how he painted. There he met the American painter James McNeill Whistler, whose misty, near-monochrome views of the Thames were nothing like the sharp realism he had been taught. This backwater, a still, sheltered stretch of water off the river, carries that lesson: muted greys and browns, edges softened by the London damp, its mood held in tone rather than in detail. Toorop had come partly for another reason, to visit the family of Annie Hall, the Englishwoman he had met as a student in Brussels. He married her the following year, in 1886.