Charley Toorop. Love for Van Gogh

Charley Toorop

For Charley Toorop, Vincent van Gogh is a great source of inspiration. His work makes such an impression on the young Charley that it is one of the reasons she eventually chooses to become an artist. Like Van Gogh, she travels to the Borinage and Provence and she shares his passion for depicting real people and nature. Van Gogh's influence is visible, particularly in the work she creates between 1921 and 1925.

Lifelong admiration

Even though Charley Toorop's work has an originality and power all its own, this doesn’t mean that she did not have an eye for the work of other artists. On the contrary. Toorop admired the painting of Bart van der Leck and Piet Mondriaan, but also foreign contemporaries such as Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger. Nevertheless, she believes that Vincent van Gogh – even more than her father Jan Toorop – was at the inception of her artistic practice and she has admired him all her life. For her, his work was ‘the breakthrough to a new world’.

From the Borinage to het social commitment

Charley Toorop's admiration for Vincent van Gogh is illustrated on the basis of several themes, including her self-depiction as an artist and as a human being, her pilgrimage to the Borinage, her travels to Paris and the south of France, her social commitment and her attitude towards people and nature.