Portrait of Madame B.

Toorop gave this portrait only a title, Madame B., and for a long time the initial was taken to point to his own sister, Elize Beets-Toorop. Research a few years ago identified someone else with an almost identical name, his friend Elisa Beetz, a Belgian sculptor and jewellery maker. She visited Toorop in 1903 at Domburg, the seaside village in Zeeland where he was working, and he painted her there. Five years later she married the French sculptor Alexandre Charpentier, with Auguste Rodin and Claude Debussy as witnesses at the wedding. Charpentier died the following year. In 1918 it was she who made Debussy's death mask, now kept at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and the Musée d'Orsay holds seven of her works in bronze.