Kröller-Müller Museum
Charley Toorop’s Love for Van Gogh
Painter Charley Toorop (1891–1955) was one of the most prominent Dutch modernists. She learned the profession from her father, Jan Toorop, the noted avant-garde painter, whom she had observed in his studio since her early childhood. Toorop is best known for her portraits, especially the many self-portraits that she made during the course of her life, which are often immediately recognizable by their distinct, expressive style. (In my family, if we wanted to describe someone with large eyes, we would say ‘Charley Toorop eyes’.) For Toorop, Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) was a great source of inspiration. His work made such an impression on the young Charley that it was one of the reasons she eventually chose to become an artist.
Until 14 September, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, which boasts one the world’s largest Van Gogh collections, presents the exhibition Charley Toorop — Love for Van Gogh, which shows that Toorop looked at the world in the same way that Van Gogh did. Not only did she find inspiration in places he had been, such as the Borinage & Provence, she also shared his passion for depicting real people and nature; this is particularly visible in her work from the first half of the 1920s. The exhibition comprises around sixty works, some of which have rarely been shown before. Located in De Hoge Veluwe, one of the most attractive national parks in the country, the Kröller-Müller Museum is one of the major modern art museums in the Netherlands.
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Marja
In 1922, Charley Toorop spent three weeks in the Borinage, an impoverished mining region in the south of Belgium, where Van Gogh had worked as a lay preacher. The Hostess and Her Daughter, shown above, depicts the landlady of the house where Toorop stayed, who exploited her daughter as a prostitute. In a letter to the poet Adriaan Roland Holst, Toorop remarked: ‘I could hardly look into that face, you cannot imagine something so terrible & infinitely bleak. The canvas I turn around at night when I go to sleep.’
Renske
Toorop’s self-portraits are the most iconic works in her oeuvre. They are a pointed self-analysis, brutal & honest, in which she explores the power of her personality & spirit, as if to test Van Gogh’s remark that ‘it’s difficult to know oneself — but it’s not easy to paint oneself either’.