Suze Robertson

Teaching drawing to girls in Rotterdam around 1880, Suze Robertson caused a stir by insisting that her pupils be allowed to work from the naked model. She was in her twenties then, teaching on weekdays and going to The Hague on Sundays for lessons with the painter Petrus van der Velden.

In 1882 she gave up teaching. What she painted afterwards is dark and heavily loaded — women bent over sewing, peeling potatoes, standing in farmhouse doorways, the paint worked until the figures carry real weight. Critics called the pictures unfeminine and puzzled over a manner they described as masculine coming from a woman. She is usually counted with the Amsterdamse Joffers, the circle of Amsterdam women painters, although she was older than the rest and already married, to the painter Richard Bisschop, from 1892.

She had trained at the academy in The Hague from 1874 under Jan Philip Koelman, a history painter, and won a bronze and two silver medals there. Later came membership of Pulchri Studio in The Hague and Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam, the two societies that ran Dutch artistic life, and a bronze medal at the Paris world's fair of 1900. By 1907 one of her canvases sold for 10,000 guilders, close to a record for a living Dutch painter. Her "Interior of a Farmhouse" is in the Van Gogh Museum.