Group portrait of H.P. Bremmer and his wife with contemporary artists

Charley Toorop worked on this large canvas from 1936 to 1938, on a commission from the foundation behind the Kroller-Muller Museum, where it still hangs. At its centre she placed H.P. Bremmer, the critic and teacher his contemporaries half-jokingly called the art pope of the Netherlands. Bremmer was the man who advised Helene Kroller-Muller on what to buy, so much of the collection around this very painting was shaped by his eye. Toorop set him among the artists of his circle, Bart van der Leck among them, each face turned outward with the hard, frontal directness she brought to every portrait. She had taken lessons from Bremmer herself years earlier, and the museum that commissioned the picture now holds more of her work than anywhere else, over 40 paintings in all.