Flower Market in London

Toorop painted this during one of his stays in London in the mid-1880s, and what caught him was not the flowers but the people who sold them, the market workers whose poverty he had seen at close hand in the city. He laid the paint on thickly with a palette knife, building the light and the crush of the crowd in broad, loaded strokes. He did something unusual with distance too. Figures further back are simply smaller, not paler, painted in the same strong colours as the ones in front, so the whole market presses forward at once. The bright, smoky light owes something to Turner, the English painter of light, whose work he had been studying in England.