Two Boys (Eddy and John Fernhout)

Charley Toorop painted these two small boys in 1922, the year the family settled in the North Holland village of Bergen, in a house their grandfather, the Symbolist Jan Toorop, had built. The children are her sons. On the left is Eddy, short for Edgar, who would grow up to be a painter himself. Beside him is John, who would become a documentary filmmaker and spend years shooting alongside Joris Ivens, one of the great names of Dutch cinema. Here they are still just two children, painted close up and head-on the way their mother painted everyone, with none of the sweetness usual in pictures of the young. She gives them the same steady, serious gaze she turned on grown sitters and on herself. Edgar is about ten, John a year younger.