The Seduction

This small canvas from 1886 has never quite settled on what it is. The museum lists it under two names, Reflections of the Sunset and The Seduction, and the doubt is the interesting part. Is this simply an evening landscape, light breaking on water, or a scene with something human and charged inside it? The year helps explain the ambiguity. Toorop was reading the Belgian Symbolist writers around him and starting to load ordinary nature with mood and suggestion, the drift that would later fill his art with brides, angels and fate. Here that turn has barely begun. The light on the water still does most of the work, and the title does the rest.