Dama in bianco

The woman in the near-white dress is Annie Hall, an Englishwoman Toorop had met in Brussels the year before, where she was studying. In 1886, when he painted her almost entirely in tones of white against a dark ground, he married her. Toorop was Dutch, born on Java in the East Indies, and at this moment he was under the spell of the American painter Whistler, who was building whole pictures out of a single colour and calling them symphonies and arrangements. You can see that here in the way the dress is pushed to an intense, near-flat white. This is early Toorop, years before he turned to the dreamlike, linear Symbolism he is now best known for. The portrait hangs in Amsterdam.