Lady in White

The woman in the near-white gown is Annie Hall, an Englishwoman Toorop had met in Brussels the year before. In 1886, the year of this portrait, the two of them married. He had just spent months in England, and it shows. He set the pale dress against a dark, almost empty ground and let the whole picture hang on that one bright shape, a way of working he had taken from James McNeill Whistler, whose London studio he had visited. There is little colour here beyond the warm skin and the white cloth. What he was after was tone, the quiet gradations of light across fabric, rather than a likeness that spells out every feature.