De hulpverlening tijdens de watersnood van 1926, symbolisch voorgesteld 1926

Jan Toorop made this work on paper, sometime in 1926, about the floods in the Netherlands. It's a symbolic drawing, so rather than showing the event directly, it is about the emotional fallout and the hope for relief. You can see the way Toorop makes marks with his pen and ink, and how the colour is built up in layers, like watercolour washes almost, how this is a way of processing the event itself, bit by bit. The different areas of shading are very clear, but it is in the faces of the figures that the detail is at its most profound. Note the face of the women at the bottom and how their suffering is etched onto the surface through the careful application of colour. This way of combining realism and symbolic imagery is similar to the work of Gustav Klimt, another artist who mixed surface decoration with quite serious subject matter.