Charley Toorop

Charley Toorop was the daughter of Jan Toorop, a leading Dutch Symbolist, and she spent her career building a manner as far from his delicate line as she could get. She trained with him, then turned to the heavy paint and hard light of Van Gogh, and grew into one of the most forceful Dutch portraitists of the 20th century.

Her faces are frontal, isolated, lit as if on a film set, and she was hardest of all on her own. The self-portraits stare straight out with an unsettling directness. All of this comes together in Three Generations, a painting she worked on from 1941 to 1950. A massive sculpted bust of her dead father looms at the back, her son Edgar, also a painter, stands to one side, and Charley fills the foreground, brush raised, eyes fixed on the viewer.

She had married the anarchist Henk Fernhout against her father's wishes, raised three children, and moved through Paris, Brussels and Utrecht before settling for good in the village of Bergen. There she worked in a studio designed for her in 1932 by Gerrit Rietveld, the architect and furniture maker of the De Stijl circle.