Jan Toorop
Hoek, Kees van
440 THE COMMONWEAL September 4, 1929 tire Walter Newton of Minnesota; and who is Mr. Newton? At present, he is one of Mr. Hoover's "secretaries," and also one of the managers of the...
...Together with Destr6e and Emile Verhaeren, Tootop came to London, where he stayed from I885 to 1889 . The painter of contrasts--which he remained all his life--he found in the great metropolis ample stimulus for his versatility...
...True to the land of his birth, he was "mysticus...
...It was in London that Toorop met Cardinal Manning, whose social ideas made a tremendous impression on the young idealist...
...Holland never cared greatly for her own great men, even when their names were pronounced with veneration throughout the civilized world...
...Painting became impossible and he had to work with pencil and chalk...
...In Holland things stood no better than anywhere else...
...These hands rival Dfirer's...
...It is painted on small pieces of paper, afterward pasted together...
...In 1889 Toorop returned to Holland, where, although he traveled widely, he lived for the rest of his life...
...The last decade of his life was a martyrdom...
...What we have seen so far is politics...
...Hundreds of touching incidents could be related of this period: how in a crowded tram car everyone lifted his hat when the great artist was wheeled across the road...
...His eastern predisposition admired the sumptuosity of Catholicism, and the northern blood in his veins made him appreciate the cooler blend which is so peculiar to the Catholicism of our hemisphere...
...JAN TOOROP By KEES VAN HOEK HEN Jan Toorop died in March, 1928 ' the whole Dutch nation mourned the loss of one of its greatest sons...
...His wife had preceded them in their London years...
...The talent nearly suffocated in the cold mathematical atmosphere of Delft blossomed into ripe promise...
...Love was the base of his philosophy...
...or the determined Bishop Callier...
...Could Jules Destr6e have imagined in those Borlnage days that in later years he himself would be a minister of state and his equally hot-blooded Dutch friend, the painter of royalty...
...From out a visionary rainbow Christ's face lights up...
...It is amusing to follow the mockeries of history...
...As a boy of fifteen he was sent to Holland to study for a post in the Dutch East Indian civil service...
...Raymakers, the distinguished provincial of the learned Dutch Jesuits...
...Nobody would have thought, when the young heathen rascal Toorop went abroad with the pious Derkinderen, that the former and not the latter would emerge as the great inspirer of a new religious art...
...Berlage, the greatest of modern Dutch architects, paid a fitting tribute to the rising fame of the painter by inviting him to decorate his famous Exchange at Amsterdam...
...What Van Gogh planned, shortly before his untimely death, his friend Toorop has been able to give the world: images of the great saints, but images for which the sturdy fishermen of the North Sea or the leaders of thought and action in our times, from Manning to Mussolini, stood model...
...Foreign visitors may find in this temple of Holland's economic activities, biblical scenes on the grey ceramic walls--Christ and the Samaritan woman, for instance--painted there by an artist who was moving toward Catholicism...
...He resided alternately in the Hague and Amsterdam, or in bungalows near the coast, at Katwijk or Domburg, where the fishermen with their straight-cut faces and powerful features were his ideal models...
...He remained true, his whole life through, to his high ideals of faith and hope, and of love as the only power behind all things...
...But the student of Delft's technical university was far more thrilled by the artistic genius of old Delft masters like Vermeer than by the modern genius of Delft's renowned engineers...
...Hoover's "secretaries," and also one of the managers of the machine in the House of Representatives, where he is supposed to be the President's courier...
...Vincent van Gogh at the end of his life wrote to his brother: "If I had power to continue I would like to paint portraits of saints from nature...
...And today, when overdeveloped individuality has resulted in countless divisions between classes and cliques, political parties and groups, religious creeds and sects, nothing proves more strongly the super-national eminence which Toorop attained than the committee which is preparing the erection of his statue...
...They would have looked like examples from past ages, though in fact they would have been men of our own day, but with a far more spiritual relationship to primitive ideals...
...Who can help admiring his great portraits--the serene Dr...
...WiUebrandt's further elucidations...
...In unbalanced youth it had attached him to the Red flag...
...Willebrandt to make the speech...
...For the first time he tasted the social doctrines of the Catholic Church and the impression of England's Cardinal remained with him all his life, as can be seen from the many Manning faces incorporated in his later creations...
...He was paralyzed in both feet...
...or the incomparably charming queen mother, the country's darling old lady...
...She charged him, not with urging, but with editing...
...And there was the serenity of a whole life in the unexpected reply: "I work so wonderfully well, thanks to my pains...
...Here he found his first contact with the general public...
...During his last illness he produced his swan song, The Prayer...
...It was long after the benediction when the verger had to tell a sobbing man in a far-away corner that he was presently going to close and lock the doors...
...September 4, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 44I It was, however, not until 19o 5 that Toorop was converted to the Faith...
...Always there was a place for what his busy hand turned out, but nothing surpasses the famous Stations of the Cross in the parish church of Oosterbeek, perhaps the most discussed modern work in Holland, in which Toorop revealed the infinite treasures still hidden in the possibilities of religious art...
...His elegy said truly: "In art the greatest, in love superior...
...The death of a great painter ought to be felt as a bereavement in a country more famous even for its schools of painting than for any of its other manifold glories...
...But the great ray of grace came on that day when he strolled into a church and the sight of a packed audience stirred him to remain...
...or of the little, unknown girl who walked beside his invalid chair and assured the grey master, "I know who you are and we pray every night for your sick leg...
...Toorop had to struggle many years, not for the recognition of his art so far as the artistic world was concerned, but certainly for an understanding by the general public...
...These were the hands of Toorop, the great laborer who glorified labor through his genius, and who was at the same time only the humble worker in God's vineyard...
...He married, in London, the beautiful Irish Miss Hall...
...After a wasted year he went to Amsterdam to study under Professor Allebe at the National Academy of Arts...
...440 THE COMMONWEAL September 4, 1929 tire Walter Newton of Minnesota...
...He saw men as the bearers or symbols of deep inner realities...
...and his denial is that of a man who, charged with forging a check, should indignantly say, "Why, to say that I robbed a hen-roost is wholly false...
...The taste of the people advanced slowly, but its development was timely enough to put fine opportunities at the artist's disposal...
...With his friend, Jules Destr~e, he helped the strikers in the Borinage and was later arrested for having demonstrated in Parliament before the reading of the Speech from the Throne...
...Toorop (who died nine months after her husband, in January) was herself Anglican, but together they used to go to the Farm Street church, or listen to the liturgical singing at the Oratory...
...He says he did not "urge" Mrs...
...To Him the painter with the tormented face and the weary eyes lifts his hands, holding a little rosary cross, praying for mercy in his final hour, soon to strike now...
...soulless, crafty, without heart or mind...
...Willebrandt named no names when she told how her protest was overridden in "two telegrams" from "the National Committee...
...How can you work so wonderfully with all those pains tormenting you...
...Powerful as Michelangelo in the conception of his apostolic figures, Toorop ranks with Botticelli in the fragrant tenderness of his child studies...
...The son of a Scandinavian father and a Javanese mother, Toorop was born in 1858 at Poeworedjo on Jav~, the main island of Holland's colonial empire...
...He was a Socialist...
...But Toorop was the first artist who found himself at the end of his life already universally recognized as a national figure...
...a friend asked...
...After their Amsterdam years, the two boys went together to Belgium, where Toorop lived in the little village of Machelen...
...The bishop of Haarlem offered him, shortly after his conversion, the decoration of the Aloysius chapel in his new cathedral of Saint Bavo...
...Toorop was under thirty and his heart was the dominating impulse in all his actions...
...But on Sunday afternoons he was the guest of aristocratic art protectors, and Trio Fleuri, the three white-clad ladies in the sunny garden, could not have been surpassed by any court painter ~ la mode...
...He was a close friend of the deeply religious Derklnderen, who later on as Allebe's successor became one of the lights of his art...
...Asked for the secret of one of his great masterpieces, The Last Supper (now in the Municipal Museum at Amsterdam) he used to point to those sturdy natives of his fishing village and answer, "Did not the Lord say that He would make from mere fishers, fishers of men...
...or the hard-toiling Monsignor Ariens, that social pioneer burdened under the troubles of thousands...
...The highest aristocracy are united with the Communist intelligentsia, conservative Cabinet ministers with the leaders of the Socialist party, the Catholic episcopate with the heads of other denominations, to honor his genius...
...Burke's so-called "denial" is no denial...
...In the same way, the publicity was directed by Henry J. Allen, now Senator from Kansas, who, though not a bigoted man, gave considerable attention to arousing prejudice of certain peculiar kinds against Governor Smith...
...It was in the days when a Dutch statesman had wittily remarked: "He who is under thirty and not a Socialist has no heart, but he who is over thirty and still a Socialist has no head...
...In portrait painting, nobody had quite the same power of assimilating the character of a sitter...
...not Republican politics, but any kind of politics...
...Hence his conversion to Catholicism opened the way to the greatest heights of his genius: his art and his character...
...in ardent faith and sublime devotion they are the very essence of art's majesty...
...Manning's personality had made the soil of his soul fertile ; the reading of Thomas Kempis caused unlimited self-reflection...
...Many orders followed...
...Catholics, the clergy first, with no sense of taste, had wasted money and energy sponsoring those awful fabrications which, turned out by wholesale, still "adorn" most of our sanctuaries...
...During the week he took the dirty beggars from London Bridge to his studio or painted his Before the House of Refuge, in which all the misery of a great town is told...
...In the next article I shall discuss Mrs...
...Finally, the speech was examined by James Francis Burke, a Catholic, and received his O.K...
Vol. 10 • September 1929 • No. 18
