Here, Jan Toorop has painted the sea at Katwijk on the Dutch coast in an original way. We can only see the water with the waves rolling in, the foaming surf and a small piece of sky. No boat or bird distracts our attention from the main subject: the sea itself, rendered in wonderful nuances of colour, from mauve and light green to yellow and blue-grey. Toorop has painted an almost abstract image which leads the spectator's eye across the restless waves to the peaceful horizon. The waves form a regular horizontal pattern. Toorop has used a palette knife to apply the paint thickly. He adopted this technique from the Belgian painter James Ensor, whom Toorop often met during the years he lived in Brussels (1882-1886). In 1886, Toorop returned to the Netherlands and went to live in The Hague. He also stayed in Katwijk for a few years and regularly spent the summers in Domburg, both on the Dutch coast. After moving to The Hague, the sea became a recurring theme in his work. This picture is one of his first sea paintings and the most pure, depicting only sea. 'The Sea' has been painted in an Impressionist manner: a quick impression using loose paint marks. Toorop worked for a time in this style, though also experimented with other styles such as Pointillism Pointillism is a method of painting in which the paint is applied in a series of tiny dots of different colours on the canvas. When seen from a distance, the dots merge more or less into a total picture. This method, originally developed by the impressionists, was employed consistently and systematically by artists such as George Seurat and Paul Signac. These French painters were known as pointillists or 'neo-impressionists'. Their manner of working influenced European artists such as the Belgian Theo van Rysselberghe and the Dutch painter Jan Toorop. He was open to the new innovative ideas of his contemporaries and used these in his own work. In the 1890s he mainly made work with mystical, symbolic subjects, such as 'O Grave, Where is Thy Victory'. This picture, with its many curls and wavy lines, also relates to Art Nouveau.