Meadow Landscape

When Toorop painted this quiet stretch of grazing land in 1884, he was a young student in Brussels, and that same year he joined Les Vingt, the circle of Belgian painters pulling the city toward everything new and difficult in European art. None of that ferment shows here. This is a level meadow under an even sky, painted plainly, the sort of unshowy landscape a careful realist makes while learning his craft. The Toorop of swaying maidens and dream-symbols is nowhere in sight. What already shows is his patience with flat Dutch light and a low horizon. He was 26 here, and had not yet settled on the style that would make his name.