Poster for Delft Salad Oil (Salad Witches)
Affectionately referred to as the “Salad Witches” here @ 20×200 HQ, Poster for Delft Salad Oil (Salad Witches) was commissioned and conceived as an advertising poster, but ultimately its influence extended well beyond its original intent.
Jan Toorop was multi-racial (his father was Dutch and Indonesian and his mother was English and Chinese) well-traveled and quite worldly. Unwilling to limit himself to any particular genre or subject, Toorop experimented with—and became highly accomplished in—many styles over the years: realism, impressionism and its many subgenres, pointillism and of course Art Nouveau, the latter being the style/era most evident with our fair witches. If you browse through a catalog of his various works over his career, it’s kind of hard to believe that one person created them all. It’s also quite inspiring to see an oeuvre unlimited by a dedication to one particular subject, style and/or influence. Toroop was admirably fluid in his approach to art-making—almost as fluid as these two slaolie ladies are, swirling around their cauldron of greens.
