Self-Portrait

Toorop was 24 when he painted this, in a studio at Machelen outside Brussels that he shared for a time with the Symbolist painter William Degouve de Nuncques. Brussels in 1883 was where the new art was being argued over. He had fallen in with the writers Emile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck, and he was watching James Ensor and Fernand Khnopff closely.

The figure he made is a type, the bohemian painter. A wide-brimmed felt hat, a long Javanese pipe in the mouth, a glance thrown sideways at the mirror. He sits by the stove in the working mess of the room, mixing watercolour on a broken plate he has pressed into service as a palette. On the shelf behind him stands a row of books, put there to say that he reads.

Pinned above them is a drawing of a landscape, which was the subject he was actually painting for a living in those years.