It has been described by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as one of its most popular paintings but the cause of its sitter’s anxious gaze has remained a mystery.
Standing in front of a crumbling wall under a menacing sky, Charley Toorop’s Working Class Woman stares ahead, her thoughts elsewhere.
Toorop, who painted the work between 1942 and 1943, had described the woman as “Mother Punt” in her letters. The charred landscape behind the sitter was understood to be wartime Rotterdam.
But it is only thanks to a case of mistaken identity by a Dutch journalist, and the sharp eyes of the sitter’s family, that the full story of the iconic piece by Toorop, whose real name was Annie Caroline Pontifex Fernhout-Toorop, has now emerged.
The woman was Johanna “Jansje” Punt, Toorop’s housekeeper, whose life had been turned upside down by the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940.
“Her three sons had been forced to work in Nazi Germany, and she feared for their lives,” said Anja Offringa-Punt, one of her grandchildren. “Charley Toorop captured her heartbreak in this portrait perfectly.” All three of Punt’s sons survived the war, the museum said.
Punt’s story came to light this year after a journalist from the Dutch newspaper Noordhollands Dagblad mistakenly identified the sitter as Trijntje Klomp-Zult.
Punt’s grandchildren spotted the error and contacted the Stedelijk Museum, holder of the largest art collection in the Netherlands, with evidence of the sitter’s true identity.
“Our family knew that grandma had worked for Charley Toorop and that she’d sat for this painting,” Offringa-Punt said. “Charley Toorop gave her a photo of the work as a gift, with a photo of Charley herself on the back, as a thank you for being her model.
“The photo has always been in the family. But we had no idea that it is such a large canvas, the photo is much smaller, and when we saw the portrait, we were amazed. We’re so proud that this painting of our grandmother is one of the icons at the Stedelijk.”
Punt was a cook of some renown among Toorop’s artistic set, which included the designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld and fellow artists Bart van der Leck and Piet Mondrian.
Toorop and Punt lived in Bergen, north of Amsterdam, but the artist decided to depict the devastation of Rotterdam in the background of the painting, using the photos of the ruined city taken by her friend and daughter-in-law Eva Besnyö as reference.
The painting differs from most of Toorop’s work in that the sitter is not staring back at the viewer. It is also the artist’s darkest work, the Stedelijk said, with only the woman’s skin and the wall to the right containing a hint of colour. Punt died in 1983.
Maurice Rummens, researcher at the Stedelijk Museum, said: “In the light of the history of the second world war in the Netherlands, it is an iconic work.
“And it means a lot to us to have finally discovered more about the story behind the work. Despite the harrowing circumstances, Charley Toorop gives her Working Class Woman something heroic.
“She has an air of acceptance but isn’t defeated, and sits erect, her gaze troubled but steadfast. The embodiment of spiritual and moral strength in a ruined world.”
