Dunes et mer à Zoutelande

Dunes et mer à Zoutelande was painted in 1907 on cardboard, one year after Toorop settled permanently on the island of Walcheren in Zeeland. Zoutelande, a small village on the island's western tip, was exposed directly to the North Sea, and its wide beach and rolling dunes offered dramatic contrasts between land, sea, and sky. By this period Toorop had converted to Catholicism and his late landscapes carry a spiritual quietude quite different from the feverish symbolic line of his 1890s work. The Kunstmuseum Den Haag, which holds the work, developed significant Post-Impressionist Dutch landscape holdings in the early twentieth century. Toorop's late coastal landscapes share an affinity with the work of fellow Domburg artist Piet Mondrian, whose early dune and sea paintings were contemporaneous.

Executed in broken colour on cardboard, the work captures shifting light above the North Sea dunes in a cool palette of blues, grey-greens, and sandy yellows. Short mosaic-like strokes fragment the landscape into vibrating patches consistent with a Post-Impressionist approach to outdoor light.