Two Apples in Leaves

From 1934 on, Charley Toorop painted the fruit trees in her Bergen garden roughly twice a year, once in spring when they blossomed and again in late summer when the branches hung heavy with apples and pears. This canvas from 1939 is one of the late-summer pictures, closed right in on two apples cradled in their leaves. She gives them the weight and presence you would expect from a portrait rather than a bowl of fruit, the forms built up hard and compact in a way that owes something to the still lifes of the Spanish painter Juan Gris. It was made the year the Second World War broke out, though the Netherlands would stay out of the fighting until the following spring. The apples are simply the ones that ripened in her own garden that year.