The Real Identitiy of Annie Hall

Rating: 10/10 (19 October 2008)

What hardly anybody knows is that the real Annie Hall was an English woman, the wife of the famous dutch artist Jan Toorop and the mother of the almost equally famous female artist Charley Toorop.
Jan Toorop (Poerworedjo, Java, December 20, 1858  The Hague, Netherlands, March 3, 1928) was a Javanese Dutch painter whose works straddle the space between the Symbolist painters and Art Nouveau.
After his marriage to Annie Hall in 1886, Toorop alternated his time between The Hague, England and Brussels, and after 1890 also the Dutch seaside town of Katwijk aan Zee. During this period he developed his own unique Symbolist style, with dynamic, unpredictable lines based on Javanese motifs, highly stylised willowy figures, and curvilinear designs.
Thereafter he turned to Art Nouveau styles, in which a similar play of lines is used for decorative purposes, without any apparent symbolic meaning. In 1905 he converted to Catholicism and began producing religious works. He also created book illustrations, posters, and stained glass designs.
Charley Toorop was born in Katwijk 1891 and died in Bergen 1955. She made a lot of self portraits.