Charley Toorop | |
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 Toorop in 1903 | |
| Born | Annie Caroline Pontifex Fernhout-Toorop (1891-03-24)24 March 1891 Katwijk, Netherlands |
| Died | 5 November 1955(1955-11-05) (aged 64) Bergen, Netherlands |
| Nationality | Dutch |
| Known for | Painting,printmaking |
Annie Caroline Pontifex Fernhout-Toorop (24 March 1891 – 5 November 1955),[1] known asCharley Toorop (Dutch pronunciation:[ˈtɕɑrliˈtoːrɔp]), was aDutchpainter and lithographer.
Charley Toorop was born inKatwijk. She was the daughter ofJan Toorop and Annie Hall. She married the philosopher Henk Fernhout in May 1912, but they divorced in 1917. Her sonEdgar Fernhout (1912–1974) also became a painter. Her other son,John Fernhout [nl] (1913–1987),[2] became a filmmaker, and often worked together withJoris Ivens. As a filmmaker he sometimes used the name John Ferno. Charley's daughter in law was the well-known Jewish photographerEva Besnyö (1910–2003), who married John in 1933.
In the on-line biography of the Dutch poetHendrik Marsman on the website of theDutch Literary Museum [nl][3] Charley Toorop is mentioned as one of the women who had a relationship with Marsman before he married in 1929 his wife Rien Barendregt.[4][5]
Charley Toorop became a member of the group of artists calledHet Signaal (The Signal) in 1916. The group aimed at depicting a deep sense of reality through the use of colours and heavily accentuated lines and through fierce contrasts of colours. This is one of the reasons why Toorop is seen as adherent to theBergense School.
Toorop befriended other artists, among themBart van der Leck andPiet Mondriaan. In 1926 Charley Toorop went to live for two years inAmsterdam, where her painting became influenced by film. Frontally depicted figures stand isolated from each other, as if lit by lamps at a movie set. Herstill lifes show kinship to the syntheticcubism ofJuan Gris. From the 1930s onwards, she painted many female figures, as well as nudes and self-portraits in a powerful, realistic style. Well-known is her large paintingThree Generations (Drie generaties) (1941–1950; in theMuseum Boijmans Van Beuningen,Rotterdam), which is a self-portrait, a portrait of her father and of her son Edgar, in which she unites both realism and a sense of symbolism.
Her ruthless realism has a magic touch. "Is the natural appearance reality," she wondered in 1917, "or can we sense in its form only the most unreal that appears before us? This unreal, which is the most real."[citation needed]
Toorop had lived at many different places, but from 1932 on she resided inBergen, North Holland, a town she'd previously had her home between 1912-1915 and 1922–1926.[1] There she designed and commissioned a house called "De Vlerken", situated at the Buerweg 19. The house is still there, although after a fire its thatched roof has been replaced by a tiled roof. Charley Toorop died in Bergen on November 5, 1955. Her works are in many public collections, notably in theKröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.
One of her paintings featured in the exhibition called "How Van Gogh Came to Groningen," which opened at theGroninger Museum in November 2024, and which considered the circles of artists, art fans, and collectors who generated early Dutch interest in the works ofVincent Van Gogh.[6]
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