Self-Portrait against Palette

By 1934 Charley Toorop was one of the most unsparing portraitists in the Netherlands, and she kept the hardest looking for her own face. Here she sets her head directly against her painter's palette, the board curving up behind her so it rings her head almost like a halo, its smears of brown, rust and a little blue and green in place of any gold. She faces you straight on, pale and sharp-featured, the heavy lids and thin mouth set down without softening. This belongs to a run of self-portraits she came back to through the 1930s, each more frontal than the last, a painter watching what time was doing to her. The colours behind her are the ones still wet on the palette she was working with.