Old Oaks in Surrey

In 1889 Les XX, the Brussels society of progressive artists that Toorop belonged to, held its yearly exhibition with Paul Gauguin among the invited guests. Toorop must have looked hard at what Gauguin was doing, and this canvas from around 1890 shows it, in the broad areas of colour and the long, undulating lines. A huge old oak, bent and hollow, fills the middle of the picture, its crooked trunk worked out in great detail. The place is Lissadel, a country estate at Kenley in Surrey that belonged to the family of his English wife, Annie, and the woman in the lilac dress, half-sitting under the tree with her back to us, is thought to be Annie herself. The paint is laid on very thinly. The fresh white of her hat, down at the lower right, is what leads the eye to her.