Female Semi-Nude

Charley Toorop painted this figure study in 1917, deep in the years when the First World War had turned the neutral Netherlands into a refuge for artists. Many had gathered in and around Bergen, the village north of Amsterdam where she was working, and the painters there shared a blunt, heavily worked manner drawn from Van Gogh. In that idiom even a half-length nude became an exercise in solid, unpolished form, a long way from the smooth academic nude. Toorop was in her mid-twenties and still finding the direction her work would take. A year earlier she had joined Het Signaal, a short-lived group of Amsterdam artists who exhibited together through the war.