Annie Caroline Pontifex Toorop, nickname Charley, was born in Katwijk in 1891. Her father was the famous Symbolist painter Jan Toorop and her mother was Annie Hall, an English woman who met Toorop in Brussels. The marriage between Jan and Annie was difficult, the performance was strict and that made Charley's childhood difficult. Her father's warmth is evident early on when Charley is allowed to join the avant-garde artist friends. Even when father Jan went to Walcheren for holidays. Charley also made her first pictures there.

From an early age she moved in circles with Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. She is also inspired by the work of artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and later by Vincent van Gogh. Despite all these sources of inspiration, Charley Toorop has never belonged to a specific art movement. Her work shows influences from such diverse styles as expressionism, the Bergen School and magical realism. As a self-taught artist, Charley Toorop develops his own painting style, but that takes some time.

Charley was musical and her parents saw her as a career as a violinist. Despite her musical talent, she chose a career in art, although painting was more difficult for her than making music. When Toorop turned eighteen, she met philosophy student Henk Fernhout, whom she married in 1912. They had three children including Eddy Fernhout.

Toorop had a lot of love and appreciation for her children, but painting was always her priority. Charley Toorop's early work around 1912 was created under the influence of expressionism. Great examples were the painters of Der Blaue Reiter, such as Wassily Kandinsky. In this period Toorop mainly painted landscapes, portraits and self-portraits. Around 1916 she was part of the artist group 'Het Signaal', which advocated a deep experience of reality by emphasizing colors and lines and introducing bright color contrasts. Partly for this reason, it is also considered part of the Bergen School. There is something magical about her ruthless realism. 'This unreal, which is the most real' had to be recorded.

 

After divorcing Fernhout in 1917, who had a drinking and aggression problem, she met H.P. Briem and Piet Mondriaan. Mondriaan arranged an apartment for her in Paris. After her return, her father had a house built in Bergen called 'de Vlerken' where many artists later came together. The artist Leo Gestel and the poet Adriaan Roland Holst belonged to her circle of friends.

In 1922 she travels through the poor Walloon mining region of the Borinage, where Van Gogh had previously lived and worked. There she discovered what she wanted with her painting: painting simple, hardworking people, where style and subject would coincide. That is why, from 1924 onwards, she consciously sought out the village of Westkapelle on Walcheren where she could sketch farmers, agricultural workers and dike workers. There, for her, life was still 'real' and 'pure' and people and the earth were still connected. In the evening she had a drink with the men at the bar in the Valk hotel and picked out her models as she went. This is how her powerful paintings from the period 1927-1933 were created, such as the farmer's family (1927), At the bar (1933) and a few years later the Old Farmer (1939).

From 1926 onwards, her house in Amsterdam at Leidsegracht 48 also became a meeting place for avant-garde artists, including the architect Gerrit Rietveld, the filmmaker Joris Ivens and the painter Carel Willink. In the works of that time, figures are positioned frontally and separately next to each other, as if they were illuminated by lights on a film set.
Around 1930 she also regularly traveled to Paris with Athur Lehning and met the surrealist artist Max Ernst. Charley Toorop's painting style then changes into an expressively realistic style. 'A photo gives no more than a moment, but in a well-painted portrait you recognize someone in all their expressions. You have to be able to see something different in it every day.' During the war she made various (self) portraits and the powerful clown for the ruins of Rotterdam.

After the death of Jan Toorop, Charley really developed her own style that reflects a businesslike, harsh reality. From then on she mainly paints portraits. A good example is the monumental painting 'Three Generations; of her father, herself and son Eddy. She worked on this painting for years, because in 1949 she suffered an attack that left her right side completely paralyzed, although she continued to paint until her death. Moreover, her son did not always feel like modeling. The painting with the three generations of Toorop was completed in 1950. In this painting, love of truth and a sense of symbolism are united.

Nowadays her rich oevre can be seen in the Kröller-Müller, Stedelijk, Museum MORE, Centraal Museum and the Boijmans. Toorop was one of the artists who founded the KunstenaarsCentrumBergen (KCB) in 1947. In 1952, Toorop was awarded the Prize of the Artists' Resistance Foundation by the Artists' Resistance Foundation 1942-1945.