A blond beauty, as if dressed in the sun, strides through dense undergrowth.

To her left, a young woman with Asian facial features and far-flowing hair holds a blue veil against the head of the woman, who appears to be walking from the sea in the background towards the jungle-like interior of the country.

Next to the maid, an elderly woman raises her hands in front of her face;

the man next door, who, huddled close to her, is probably her husband, stares straight ahead with an unhappy expression.

Executed in oil, the face of the woman in the gold dress remains curiously flat, while the sad eyes, mouth and nose are engraved in pencil by the artist, giving the whole the impression of features in a pancake being cut into by a child with a cake knife Has.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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In the expansive dress of the central woman, all the colors of the sky mingle behind her on the left: the yellow of the sunlit clouds as the fabric color with the light blue of the azure and the bottle green of the sea as the shadow of the folds.

In all other bodies, the colors of the jungle-like dense foil of green and brown mix wildly.

The girl, who is holding her train, which shimmers like golden silk, to the right of the woman sotto bosco, recedes completely into this extremely painterly, blurred background.

A rhizome of blood threads underfoot?

The reddish-brown earth of the ground on which the golden woman is standing appears dry and cracked, which is unlikely given the exuberant fertility.

Rather, a bloody thread appears to be twisting eerily under her feet, twisting and crossing several times.

A similar green net of plant stalks and lianas covers a naked child next to her, making her small body almost invisible in the undergrowth.

The only elements that do not blend into their respective backgrounds, but are draped uninterruptedly on the ground by the painter, are the emerald-green snake, but turning towards a bird and not towards the woman, and the two parrots, brilliantly jewel-like, bluish-red, whose contours deeply scratched with the handle of the brush were once again specially differentiated from the color worlds surrounding them;

finally the intense red blossoms at the feet of the woman.

In view of the abundant plasticity and fertility of flora and fauna, which is sensitively painted in every detail, the temptation is great to see the artist at home in such a paradisiacal ambience.

His name is found in the snake's tail: "J.

Toorop” can be read there, highly symbolically, in the furthest coil of the animal of sin.

In fact, the painter Jan Toorop, much too little known in Germany today, but at the time widely known in Parisian Impressionist Symbolism and as part of the Belgian avant-garde artist group "Les Vingt", came to Purworejo in 1858 on the jungle-covered island of Java in the island state of Indonesia, then " Dutch East Indies”, the son of a Dutchman and a British woman.

The highly symbolic placement of his signature is also no coincidence,

After all, the depiction of nature is by no means a naturalistic one, but rather one permeated with numerous symbolisms.

The sad beauty is clothed with the sun, like the apocalyptic woman with child, commonly known as Maria, in the Revelation of St. John, but Toorop himself gave the picture, which was created between 1890 and 1892, the title “hetaera”.