The Bride

In the early 1890s a notion was spreading among young painters, that a line by itself could carry a feeling, the way a chord does. Thorn Prikker was 25 and working in The Hague when he built an entire picture on it. On this tall canvas a veiled bride is pulled by long, wavy lines toward the crucified Christ, a mystical marriage rather than an earthly wedding. The flowers threaded through the design do the arguing: a lily for the bride's purity, a thorned passionflower for Christ's suffering, good and evil set out in petals. The French painter Georges Seurat, known for building images from tiny dots of color, had convinced him that line and color could stand on their own for unease, power and holiness. A few years after finishing it, Thorn Prikker decided this kind of symbolism was nonsense and gave himself to designing useful, everyday things.