Three-Panel Folding Screen with Clouds and Flowers

Around 1918 Charley Toorop painted three tall canvas panels, each well over a metre and a half high, and had them set into a wooden folding screen, a piece of furniture for dividing a room. Across it a diagonal streak of cloud gleams in a landscape at dusk, two crossed branches stand angular in the foreground, and on the left the shapes slip toward abstraction and become hard to name. The play of glowing and dark colours is typical of the Dutch Expressionism of those years, and the flower with drooping petals may have been meant as a sign of decay. The screen was apparently never meant for her own rooms. It was first shown at the Stedelijk Museum in 1919 and offered for sale there, and it was another 30 years before the museum bought it.