It is not hard to sympathize with the critic's enthusiasm. Toorop has filled his carefully drawn and precise pencil lines with a snowstorm of minuscule, brightly coloured dots that leave the white underpainting visible throughout the surface. This technique gives the painting a unique etherial quality. The combination of consummate draughtmanship and fine stippling makes this portrait perhaps the finest Toorop ever made. Jeanette de Lange is stepped in her reading; she lovingly touches an illustration. Her bosom and the book are brightly lit to a purple white by a shining kerosine lamp. The table on which the lamp is standing is covered by a cloth with a flowery pattern. On the cloth, a drinking glass with flowers, and behind the sitter a bigger vase carries a generous bunch of flowers that melts with the brightly coloured flower-patterns on the wall. A comparable, slightly earlier portrait by Toorop, although infinitely less charming than in this one is the 'Print-lover', a portrait of the scholar Aegidius Timmerman (Otterlo, Museum Kröller-Müller). Toorop had started this portrait in 1898 only to finish it in 1900. The sitter, author and teacher of classical languages, has left us a remarkable description of Toorop's entourage of adoring ladies in his memoirs 'Tim's herinneringen' of 1938. With his exotic Javanese looks and his penchant for the Unexplicable, Toorop exerted a mesmerizing influence upon his admirers. Although he wrote disparagingly about Toorop as a thinker, Timmerman acknowledged the artist's remarkable craftsmanship. He had developed an incisive, decorative linear style in the 1890's, that he now combined with the neo-impressionist technique that he had learned from Seurat and Signac in 1886. The painstaking process of minute stippling had as its consequence that Toorop made no more than five paintings a year. He soon dropped this style for a broader, more expressive stippling technique.