Fatalism

This is a drawing in chalk and pencil, made in 1893, at the height of Toorop's Symbolist years. Its subject is fate, and it is not gentle. A man is caught in the streaming hair and drapery of spirit-like women, hemmed in by graves, while the words the figures seem to speak curl out of them as long stylized lines. The tempting, destructive woman was a favorite theme of Symbolists across Europe, and Toorop gave it his own restless line, all willowy figures and curling contours he traced partly to the shadow-puppets and ornament of Java, the island where he was born. Here the flowing lines carry the sound as much as the shapes.