Charley Toorop (1891-1955)

Charley Toorop was born in March 1891 in Katwijk as  daughter of the famous Dutch artist Jan Toorop and his English wife Annie Hall. Due to her background she quickly moved in avant-garde circles and became befriended with people like Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld. Her talent was widely accepted after her first retrospective in 1927 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. She would become known for her portraits, in which she usually depicted herself or figures that surrounded her, such as her children, friends and fellow-artists.

In the thirties Charley worked tirelessly on her own style. She came to a very personal, powerful form of expressionism, and tried to paint the essence of things, often by enhancing colours and forms. Charley was never part of a specific movement or school. A very personal characteristic in her work is the monumental way in which she approached her subjects. Like the present lot Vruchten tegen landschap in which she portraits fruits in an almost monumental way, by leaving out any foreground and reducing the colours in the background.

Early on, Charley painted still lifes in dark, glowing, exaggerated colours. Her still-lives can be regarded as a practice of style, texture and colour balance, but also studies of composition and expressive abilities. Through the years the autumn still-lives were a recurrent theme for Charley, of which she made almost twenty paintings. Often small, but this fine and impressive example belongs to one of her largest and most intriguing paintings of this subject.

Prominent in the colour scheme of  Vruchten tegen Landschap is the use of the primary colours, red, yellow and blue, often associated with the Stijl movement, and artists like Mondrian and Rietveld. Shortly before this painting was made, Rietveld who was a close friend of Charley rebuild her house and studio in Bergen.

Vruchten tegen Landschap was the first and the largest fruit still life in which Charely combined autumn fruits with a landscape in the back. The smaller examples can be found in several Dutch museums.

Charley was a great admirer of Vincent van Gogh. She was deeply moved by the way van Gogh saw and painted reality. Through Van Gogh’s work she could break free, artistically from her father Jan Toorop who organised the first exhibition of his work. Like Van Gogh, Charley took the real world as starting point. She never reproduced the real world photographically, but formed it into her own image. This fruit still life brings in mind Van Gogh’s early fruit still lifes from 1885. Another direct inspiration for Charley her work were the vibrant and colourful fruit paintings by the great French artist Gustave Courbet of whom she was a great admirer as well.

In this amazing vibrant Vruchten tegen landschap Toorop captured the essence of autumn: the setting sun in the background, the leaf less shrubs surrounded by left off plants an grasses and off course the autumn fruits: apples, pears and grapes. As we know that Charley only worked from reality, she must have started the painting when these fruits where available in autumn 1933. Close examination of the painting shows that Charley worked extensively on this painting changing the composition little by little till the perfect harmony was reached. This can be observed especially in the way she painted and enlarged the bunch of grapes. Due to the text on the back of the painting we know that Charley finished this painting in March 1934. So she started from observation but finished from memory.

This beautiful work clearly and convincingly shows her masterful handling of realism and expressionism. Through her expressive style of painting, with broad brushstrokes, she depicted autumn: powerful but tender at the same time.