The new Generation

Jan Toorop's 'The New Generation' of 1892 stands among the most important works of Dutch Symbolism, painted at the peak of his mature Symbolist phase. By 1892 Toorop had developed the elaborate, densely ornamented visual language for which he is best known — sinuous, elongated figures derived partly from Javanese wayang shadow puppets and partly from the European Art Nouveau current just then taking form. The painting's title announces a generational theme: the emergence of new forces, new ideas, perhaps a utopian vision of social renewal that was widespread in avant-garde circles of the 1890s. Toorop was deeply embedded in progressive intellectual life, associated with Les XX in Brussels and engaged with Anarchist and Socialist ideas alongside his later Spiritualist and Catholic phases. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam holds this work as part of a significant collection of Dutch Symbolist painting. The extraordinary visual density of Toorop's 1892 compositions — multiple interlocking figures, wave-like hair treated as ornamental pattern, facial types drawn from multiple cultural traditions — makes works like this unlike anything else in European painting of the period.

The composition is typically dense and layered, with the characteristic Toorop technique of embedding figures in ornamental grounds that simultaneously frame and merge with them. Line is paramount — sinuous, arabesque-like contours define forms with expressive, quasi-rhythmic energy. Color is used symbolically rather than naturalistically.