Henry van de Velde, Decoratieve plantencompositie, c. 1892–93. Pastel on paper, 47.8 × 50.5 cm. Collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.
"The bulky orange fruit of the image has been compared to an engorged breast; I see it as part of a rubber vine swollen with milky latex. The visible stem and gourd resemble closely those with coarse skin and “savory pulp” that writers said the Congo natives enjoyed. And the sinuous cord and adhering wraparound, “dividing and subdividing,” echo the “tendon”-like firmness and multiple, and multiplying, curves of the Congo forests that contemporaries noted were draped with the vines that were the source of the wondrous “caoutchouc.”"
-Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I