Vers le soir

In 1884 Toorop was in his mid-twenties and living in Brussels, a decade before the sinuous Symbolist figures that made his name. He had joined Les Vingt, a circle of young avant-garde artists in the Belgian capital, and he was studying Gustave Courbet, the French painter of laborers and plain country life, on trips to Paris. This canvas belongs to that early, realist Toorop. The title means simply towards evening, and it comes from the years when he painted ordinary people and the fall of daylight directly, without the flowing line he would later be famous for. He would not turn to Symbolism until the 1890s.