In Father's Footsteps

In Father's Footsteps The full name of the little Dutch girl was Annie Caroline Pontifex Toorop, but her masterful painter-father Jan soon cut it down to plain "Charley"--explaining that he just liked the name. Father Jan was less masterful in his attempts to make Charley study art; she determined to study music instead. But Jan Toorop won in the end: when Charley's marriage broke up, leaving her with three small children to raise, she turned to painting to help make ends meet.

Last week a retrospective show of 146 oils, sketches and prints in The Hague's Municipal Museum showed why some Dutch critics consider 60-year-old Charley Toorop "one of today's most important figures in Dutch or perhaps even European painting."

At first Charley combined baby-sitting with her painting, turned out glowing portraits of her own children. But she got bored with the soft outlines and warm colors of the nursery, went outside into the cold, hard northern light. Soon she was doing angular, boldly drawn studies of Dutch cities, and sculptural, hard-bitten portraits of Rotterdam prostitutes, rugged Low Country peasants and miners as well as artists and intellectuals.

Charley's cluttered waterfront scenes are a far cry from Vermeer's luminous View of Delft, her masklike portraits a long jump from Rembrandt. Nonetheless, Charley rightfully considers most of her painting "very Dutch," especially the group portraits where full-lipped, wide-eyed Hollanders stare thoughtfully into space as they might have from the paintings of the 17th Century masters. Like the old masters Charley admires most, she also does endless self-portraits. One of the outstanding pictures in her current show is Three Generations, a marble-cold,unflattering studio portrait of herself and her artist-son Edgar Fernhout, with an ominous bronze bust of her father lowering darkly over their shoulders.

Although three strokes have left her partially paralyzed and barely able to speak, Charley still spends two hours a day painting in her scrupulously neat studio in the Dutch town of Bergen. "I'm never afraid," she says in her painful, halting speech. "Life doesn't interest me. Work interests me."

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