Woman in a Room

By 1918, when Charley Toorop painted this interior, the First World War was in its final months and the neutral Netherlands was still crowded with artists who had sat the fighting out. The subject could hardly be quieter, a woman in an ordinary room, the kind of domestic interior Dutch painters had been making for three centuries. Toorop was 27 and had spent the decade among the Bergen painters north of Amsterdam, working toward the heavy, structural handling that runs through all her later pictures. The severe frontal portraits she is remembered for were still years off. The war beside which she painted this quiet room would end that November.