Charley Looking at Prints

As a leader of the Symbolist and Pointillist movements in the Netherlands, Jan Toorop was one of the most important Dutch artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Toorop’s prints are scarce because he did not edition them, preferring instead to present them as gifts to his contemporaries. He often used drypoint, a printmaking technique in which the lines are scratched, not engraved, into the copper plate, as in this print of his daughter Charley, who later became an artist herself. Presumably depicted in the Toorops’ Art Nouveau dining room, Charley casually thumbs through an album of prints. A dedicatory inscription at the lower right dates the work to 1905 but the patron’s name remains illegible.