Jan Theodoor Toorop was born on December 20, 1858 in Purworejo on Java in the Dutch East Indies. He was a descendant of a Dutch-Indonesian father and a British mother. In 1869, he left Indonesia for the Netherlands, where he studied in Delft and Amsterdam. In 1880, Toorop became a student at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. From 1882 to 1886, he lived in Brussels, where he joined Les XX (Les Vingts), a group of artists centered around James Ensor. After his marriage to the British Annie Hall in 1886, Toorop alternated his time between The Hague, Brussels and England. After 1890 Toorop also spent time in the Dutch seaside town of Katwijk aan Zee. During this period he developed his own unique Symbolist style, with dynamic, unpredictable lines based on Javanese motifs, highly stylised willowy figures, and curvilinear designs. Toorop died on March 3rd, 1928 in The Hague.

Annotated by fellow artist Guillaume van Strydonck (1861-1937), one of the founding members of Les Vingt or Les XX in 1884, it was most likely being presented to Belgium collectors such as Henri van Cutsem. The small town of Machelen, in Flemish Brabant, held a particular appeal to Van Strydonck and he invited his friends William Degouve de Nuncques, James Ensor and Jan Toorop as early as the mid-1880s. Although Van Strydonck would return to Machelen’s countryside throughout his career, Toorop sojourned in this village until the spring of 1885.[1] Under the influence of Ensor, who had supported his acceptance in Les XX in 1884, Toorop started to use the palette knife.

[1] Gerard van Wezel, Jan Toorop. Zang der tijden, The Hague, 2016, p. 17