Two Children

This is one of Charley Toorop's earliest paintings, made in 1915, when she was 24 and the First World War was tearing across the borders of a neutral Netherlands. She had grown up the daughter of Jan Toorop, one of the country's leading Symbolists, and here she is already pulling away from his fine decorative line toward the heavier, blunter paint she found in Van Gogh. The subject is plain and close to home, two children, the kind of everyday motif she would return to for the rest of her life. These were also the years she settled among the artists gathering in the village of Bergen, north of Amsterdam, where a small colony kept working while the rest of Europe fought.