Jan Theodoor Toorop was born on 20 December 1858 in Purworejo on Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). He was a descendant of a Dutch-Indonesian father and a British mother, who moved to the Netherlands at the age of eleven. In 1880, Toorop enrolled at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. From 1882 to 1886, he lived in Brussels, where he became closely involved with Les XX (Les Vingts), a group of progressive artists centered around James Ensor (1860-1949). After his marriage to the British Annie Hall in 1886, Toorop alternated his time between The Hague, Brussels, and England. Beginning in 1890, Toorop also spent time in the Dutch seaside town Katwijk aan Zee. During this period he developed his own unique Symbolist style, with dynamic, unpredictable lines based on Javanese motifs, highly stylized willowy figures, and curvilinear designs. Toorop died on 3 March 1928 in The Hague.

Little is known about Dora Lüthy, née Arbenz. Her husband, Friedrich Alfred Lüthy, was born in Soluthurn in 1851, the youngest son of merchant Eduard Lüthi. In 1859, Eduard Lüthy bought the seventeenth-century villa Feldbrunnenhof on the Baslerstrasse. Like his two brothers, Friedrich chose the merchant profession and went abroad. At the age of twenty-six, Lüthy became an assistant on a large tobacco plantation of the Swiss firm Näher und Grob in the Sultanate of Serdang on Sumatra, a plantation he would later manage. By the spring of 1890, Lüthy returned to Feldbrunnen with a small fortune (over 16 million Swiss francs in today’s value). At home, he converted the family’s residence into Villa Serdang, named after the sultanate of Sumatra, in 1892 designed by the established Zürich architects Alfred Chiodera and Theophil Tschudy.

In 1894, Lüthy married Dora Arbenz, daughter of a Zürich bank director. Lüthy was not very involved in his community, often even at odds with it. Nevertheless, he was a great supporter of today’s natural history museum and social institutions in Solothurn. Lüthy died of an illness on 2 December 1909, which may explain the lack of a pendant portrait, although they could have been separated by inheritance.

Probably because of the tobacco trade in the Dutch East Indies, the Lüthys felt an affinity with Jan Toorop, the most prominent artist in the beginning of the twentieth century. It could also be that they were introduced to Toorop by Nina and Fritz Meyer-Fierz, Zürich collectors who commissioned identical portraits the same year. Although no information is known on Dora Lüthy and her activities as a collector, living in the sizeable Jugendstill villa Serdang certainly would allow for a welcoming home for collecting art and contemporary commissions. The Lüthy children were eternalized in portraits by the Swiss artist Albert Anker in 1900.