Jan Theodoor Toorop was born on 20 December 1858 on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). His heritage was a rich mixture of Norwegian, Dutch, Javanese, Chinese, and British Indian ancestry. At the age of ten, he travelled alone to the Netherlands to receive his education and would never see his parents or homeland again. Destined for a career in civil service, instead, Toorop instead enrolled at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 1880. After eighteen months, he left the academy and moved to Brussels in the autumn of 1882. There, he met his future wife, the Scottish Annie Hall (1860-1929).

In Brussels, Toorop’s international began to take shape. He experimented with different styles and techniques and exhibited with Les XX (Les Vingts), the avant-garde artists’ society centered around James Ensor. In 1886, Toorop and Annie Hall married and moved to The Hague. Their lives were marked by tragedy: their six-month-old daughter died, and Toorop himself suffered from syphilis. Back in Brussels, Toorop recovered and became an important intermediary between the Dutch and international art worlds. When he finally settled in The Netherlands in 1890, Toorop was regarded as the leading Dutch avant-garde artist of his generation, with international connections and aspirations.

Toorop cofounded the Haagse Kunstkring and organized the first retrospective exhibition of Vincent van Gogh, followed by a group show of Les XX in 1892. That same year, the French occultist Sar Péladan visited The Netherlands and persuaded Toorop to participate in his Salon de la Rose+Croix, marking Toorop’s transition into Symbolism. Seeking to create an art imbued with spiritual meaning, Toorop became increasingly attracted to Catholicism.

In 1905, the international multi-cultural Toorop converted to Catholicism. He even moved to Nijmegen, one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands and an important center of Dutch Catholicism near the German border. Catholic doctrine provided Toorop with a greater sense of certainty in his mystical beliefs, while the Church offered him the visual language and iconography to express them. From 1910 onward, declining health prevented Toorop from spending long hours in the studio and limited him to working with pencil and chalk. His interest in religious subjects also lent itself particularly well to the precision and detail of drawing.

While religious themes appeared throughout Toorop’s career, they became central in his later work. Although he first worked on Christus Eucharisticus in 1909, the theme subsequently evolved into The worship of the Crucified Jesus: rather than presenting Christ through symbols of bread and wine, Toorop depicted him now nailed to the cross. A larger, square format drawing, The Pilgrim, further developed his distinctive religious and mystical imagery. Both The Pilgrim and The worship of the Crucified Jesus were exhibited at the XIII Biennale in Venice in 1922, together with twenty-five other drawings, in a room dedicated to Toorop.