Sea at Katwijk

By 1887 the painters of the Hague School had made the Dutch North Sea coast one of the best-loved subjects in the country's art, with grey skies, wide beaches and fishing boats pulled up on the sand. At Katwijk, a fishing village near Leiden, Jan Toorop left almost all of that out. There is no boat and no fisherman here, only a thin strip of beach and the surf rolling in under a pale sky. He built the waves with brush and palette knife in flat, thick strokes, and from a few steps away they read as real breakers. Up close, the white foam is shot through with greens, lilacs, yellows and touches of red. The collector Herman Lohr bought the canvas from Toorop around 1910, and in 1973 Ina Lohr, a musician in Basel, gave it to the Rijksmuseum.