Charley Toorop is hardly known outside of Holland which, if you ask me, is an art historical disaster.

Charley, whose real name was Annie Caroline Pontifex Toorop, was born on March 24, 1891 to Jan Toorop and Annie Hall (no relation to the Woody Allen movie). The couple had previously had a son who died shortly after his birth, a tragedy that Annie blamed on her husband’s syphilis. So Charley’s life was bound for trauma from the get-go. Her mother was stern, demanding, and had a stick in a place that no stick should be. Her father, on the other hand, was kind, imaginative, and warm. He was also an artist and supported his daughter’s artistic endeavors from day one. Charley was much closer to her father despite the fact that when the couple separated, Annie was the one to take custody. Her parents never divorced however, because Annie was a hardcore Roman Catholic.

Growing up, Charley was moved from place to place in order to receive music lessons. She had a great voice and was trained extensively in violin but never went to normal school. Her father brought her around many artists and writers, one of them being Piet Mondriaan (which is how he spelled his name before moving to Paris and getting famous). Eventually the pressure from her parents to play music got to her and she had a mental breakdown, subsequently turning to art instead. She had an affinity for it as the daughter of an artist who spent many hours in her father’s studio as a model.

By the time Charley was twenty-one she had moved to Amsterdam and met John Fernhout, a philosopher, and, to the horror of Charley’s parents, an atheist. In the Netherlands at the time there was a rule that you could only get married if your parents approved of the marriage, which definitely would have stopped the union if Charley hadn’t found a way around that rule. She got pregnant and her parents approved only because they didn’t want their first grandchild born out of wedlock. It turns out her parents were right about Fernhout though. He was a drunk and a psycho, threatening her with a knife at one point and also destroying her work. Before they got divorced the couple had two more children.

Charley rebelled against her mother's strict parenting style by letting her kids do their own thing, which they unfortunately came to see as neglect. She had a ton of lovers and male friends and focused on her art at the expense of time spent with her kids. Eventually she saw the error in her ways and then became obsessed with them to the point that they moved to different countries to get away from her. Basically, her familial life, financial life, and love life were all a disaster. Misery struck again when she had a stroke that paralyzed the right side of her body. Through enough physical therapy she could walk with a cane and speak, but her friends and family had to pull it together to pay her mortgage and care for her. Eventually she succumbed to her condition and died on November 5, 1955 in relative obscurity.